


Shells

by paceisthetrick



Category: judas kiss, no night is too long
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-04-08
Updated: 2012-09-19
Packaged: 2017-11-03 07:16:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 12
Words: 36,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/378738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paceisthetrick/pseuds/paceisthetrick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tim Cornish discovers a ghost in Ivo's past, a mysterious boy named Danny Reyes whom everyone seems to know and no one wants to talk about.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: The Ghost Within

**Author's Note:**

> AN: This is an AU take on No Night is Too Long (a bit of the film, a bit of the book) - what happens after Tim and Ivo have their talk about Isabel on the island. Ivo doesn't die, Tim never slept with Ivo's sister, and the events that make up the movie/book serve as background and little more. I just happen to love the characters Tim and Ivo. Likewise, I have borrowed Danny Reyes from Judas Kiss because I adore that character, though I am certain Carlos Pedraza (to whom Danny rightfully belongs) is a little appalled. I ask that he forgive me.
> 
> Stories tend to write themselves and I have no idea where this will end up. That said, know that I am holding out for an HEA for Ivo and Tim.
> 
> Happy reading!
> 
> ~ Pace is the trick

****Disclaimer :** All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of pace is the trick. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.**

  


 

[](http://s774.photobucket.com/albums/yy22/Sivanasya/?action=view&current=Shells1.jpg)

**  
**

  


**Prologue: The Ghost Inside**

Everyone has a ghost in their past, someone they would much rather keep there - buried, hidden. I'm different to most people. My ghost doesn't belong to me at all. In fact, I've never even met him; he died long before I ever entered the scene. But he is as real to me as Ivo. I know the sound of his voice - his laugh, his growl, his drunken slur; his peculiar narrow, slanted scrawl; I know his petulant expression when he didn't get his way and that look of utter serenity when he did. I know how his long black bangs fell over his left eye and how he constantly had to push them back to be able to see. I know that he only used his right eye for the lens and that is why his bangs fell to the left. Or maybe his hair grew that way and he adapted his camera habits accordingly. I know his favorite books, his favorite poet, his favorite foods, his favorite sweater. I know his undergraduate grades and how much money he borrowed to put himself through school. That is, until Ivo footed his bills. I know that he preferred cats to dogs but had the latter not the former, was a fast sprinter, a passable pianist and a better guitarist. I know the names of every one of his films. I know what he thought and how he felt.

I know that Danny was Ivo's first love.

Strange that I should love Ivo so much now when this same time last year I couldn't wait to leave him. How is it that a dead man could so threaten me that I would embrace what I had previously regarded as my prison? After the accident, I stayed with Ivo only from a lack of other options. He thought I wanted to end things because I was confused about my sexuality, that I was too young to accept the fact that I was gay. He felt that unresolved issues in my childhood had left me incapable of intimacy, that being vulnerable in love terrified me. I tried to tell him that I just didn't want to be with him, that I just didn't love him, but then he pointed out the unfortunate reality of my financial circumstances. I had finished school, had no job prospects and therefore no means of supporting myself. I intended to be a writer but that would hardly bring a steady pay check. It was much too late to start looking for a teaching position. I had, after all, assumed I would return to live with Ivo and figure things out then. He proposed that we keep that original plan, but that I stay with him for companionship rather than love. He had plenty of money to provide for me while I worked on my first novel and he even said we could lay off the sex for a while to give me time. (I asked time for what and that was when he launched into his speech about sexual identity confusion/vulnerability issues.) I was still recovering from falling nearly one hundred feet and almost drowning and was in no condition to fight back so I acquiesced and returned with him to Warwick. The laying off of sex lasted about a month and then Ivo was back in my bed. But he had changed, treating me with care and consideration as if I were too fragile to withstand the brutal mating rituals that had been the foundation of our relationship.

Such was our life before Danny. Ivo taught his class and I stayed home and pretended to write, taking pills to get through the day. He came home, we ate dinner, he graded papers, I read, we went to bed, we had sex. Occasionally, he traveled for a conference and I stayed home and pretended to write. He came back with lavish gifts for me, told me all about what he had done and who he had met and made me dinner. We ate and went to bed and had sex. Not once did he ask how the novel was progressing and I had a good idea that he knew what I did in my spare time, as if he had hired someone to watch me and report to him on my activities. I surfed the internet, watched television, read, saw my psychiatrist, got more pills, and took naps. Lots and lots of naps. Some days I didn't even get out of bed until Ivo was home.

In November, he had to give a paper in Seattle and insisted that I come with him. Nine days alone was much too much, in his opinion, for me to be on my own. Anyway, his sister had invited us up to Vancouver for her husband Kit's birthday. She wanted it to be a family affair, just the four of us in their cottage on Vancouver Island. Actually, I wanted to go. I wanted to see her again. I no longer fancied myself in love with her; I was much too angry at being a pawn in their game. But I was curious to see her again. Perhaps I just wanted revenge, wanted to show her I didn't care a thing for her in spite of my passionate declarations of love. So we set off for our early vacation. Of course I got sick on the trip and took to bed, feverish and vomiting. Ivo took care of me for the first three days until he had to leave for Seattle at which point Isabel took over. She was exactly as I remembered, only very much Ivo's sister and very married. I marveled at my stupidity as much as their duplicity.

On the fifth day of confinement - when I was feeling much better but too cowardly to face Isabel and Kit - I explored the small guest bedroom for something to do. I opened the drawers to a little nondescript desk tucked well out of the way under the eaves and that's how I found Danny. He literally fell out, face down, onto the floor. I picked up the photo without thinking, intending to put it back but the words _Danny and Ivo, Budapest, 1984_ in a most unusual hand caught my eye. Perhaps it was seeing Ivo's name or the location or the date but for whatever reason, I turned it over and that was my first glimpse of him - a young, thin boy with black hair and fathomless blue eyes. There was an animal-like sensuality to him, as if he wasn't entirely human and the way his arm rested easily on Ivo's shoulder told me they were lovers. Ivo was younger then but that wasn't the only difference in him. The past decade had not merely aged him, it had ravaged him. Beside Danny stood a different Ivo, one who was relaxed, rested, happy.  
 _  
Happy.  
_  
My first knowledge of Danny was that he had made Ivo happy. That bothered me far more than it should have. I would have preferred that he and Ivo had been "companions", as Ivo and I now were. The fact that Danny had meant something to Ivo upset me. I immediately went on the defensive, reminding myself that I didn't love Ivo, that ours was a relationship of convenience, that he was older than me so of course he had had someone before me. But the two serene faces gazing at me from the photo rattled me. I felt threatened though I couldn't understand why. My security in knowing that Ivo worshipped the ground I walked upon was shaken. Suddenly there was somebody else, somebody he loved a sight bit more than he loved me.

I had to find out who Danny was.

Like Pandora opening that fateful box, I dug through the rest of the drawer, unearthing more and more evidence of the love affair between the silent boy and Ivo. I compiled the photographs in chronological order and moved on to sift the contents of the next drawer. This was a treasure trove. More pictures and oh so many other things. Letters and video cassettes and journals and diplomas. Daniel Carlos Reyes was unleashed from the lifeless lowboy, spilling like the ink of his uneven scrawl to the floor around me.

My ghost had found me. I would be haunted for the rest of my life.


	2. Secrets

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tim learns more about Danny.

**  
**

**Chapter One: Secrets**

Ivo returned from Seattle and immediately sensed the change in me. I had never liked being under the microscope and having discovered something I was certain he intended to keep hidden, I was most anxious to avoid his scrutiny and thereby give the game away. He spent all of Kit's birthday dinner not too surreptitiously watching me and then most of that night fretting over what was wrong while I pretended to sleep. At best he probably thought it was the change in climate and diet or that I was being defiant and not taking my meds; at worst, I figured he suspected it was my reaction to seeing Isabel again. I imagined he thought I was going to do something rash like throw myself off another cliff. He had that look in his eye that said he wasn't going to let me out of his sight the rest of the time we were there. I felt like telling him that I didn't care enough to summon the energy necessary for that kind of act. The pills pretty much killed any drive in me.

But of course I did care. I cared enormously. Not about Isabel. I could have cared less if she dropped dead for all my declarations of love last summer. I cared about Danny. For two solid days I had sat on the floor reading and re-reading the contents of the drawers and studying the dozens of photos. I can't even begin to explain the depth of my obsession. I was completely consumed and totally confused as to why. Had it been anybody else with Ivo, I don't think I would have cared at all. But there was something about him. The way he looked at me, frozen in time, studying me, judging me. He eyed me, not so much curious as confident. He knew I didn't measure up. He looked at me and laughed and said, "Who do you think you are? What are you doing with Ivo?" He was so young and so sure of himself. He sat at the table with famous directors and then wrote letters to Ivo telling him everything that was wrong with their films and how hard it was not to correct them.

_Another loooooooooooooong day on set and I have to remind myself that I actually did choose to be here. But you'd be proud of me. I've learned to shut up. I actually am capable of just sititing, watching and learning. I will say one thing for him. He does have some good techniques._

_Here's a pic of me and Kelly Segal. She plays the terrorist who gets killed. We had a lot of fun working on the dead scene because she kept getting a cramp in her back lying on the ground for so long and then her eye started twitching. Eric was frustrated as hell. It took three fucking hours to shoot a 30-second scene. Kelly says it was the best bonding experience ever. Anyway she's super sweet and fun and we have dinner together almost every night. She had this totally traumatic childhood and is just the sweetest happiest person. I tell her I can't imagine how she does it. I think she must have brain damage or something._

_Love you,_

_Danny_

I saw him change over time, growing from a young cocky first-year to a polished director on the film festival circuit. A movie he shot his senior year actually made the IFF and he and Ivo sat at the screenings, suited and tied. He was praised by some critics, slammed by others, but none of it seemed to affect him. He did what he wanted and could care less what they thought. He had Ivo. I saw their relationship evolve over time as well. He didn't simply love Ivo, he belonged to him. Nothing could come between them, not even me ten years down the line. He could travel anywhere, send Ivo anywhere, and still they were together. He had no interest in anyone else. He confided in him in a way I found unimaginable. I wouldn't be that honest with my shrink let alone my lover. It made me uncomfortable to witness their intimacy, made me want to turn away.  
 _  
_ _I dreamed about you last night._ That familiar thin, slanted hand a year later. _There had been a war, a nuclear attack of some sort. Somehow we survived. I could see the mushroom clouds in the distance, the wall of fire demolishing everything around us. But we weren't touched by it. I remember you had an odd shimmering light around you, like you were an angel._

_The radiation had changed us. We were able to communicate with one another with our thoughts, like aliens. So we walked a bit a ways from one another, scoping out the damage, but I could hear everything you said, without even looking at you._

_We looked at all the destruction around us and you told me how grateful you were, how lucky we were to have survived, how much you loved me. And I wasn't sad at all by all the death around us. I had you and that was all that mattered to me. I had you and we loved one another and there was hope for the future._

_I woke up and imagined that you were here with me, holding me. I can still smell you on my skin. Even in that dream, you are so very real to me no matter how far away._

_I love you,_

_Danny_

They shared everything together. I began to feel that the lines between them were blurred, that each was an integral part of the other. I was so envious. Ivo had been distant with me, leaving me completely at sea as to where I stood with him. I confided in him in the beginning but he was always aloof. He had made me beg for his affection, leaving me bitter and sore. He made me whine like a woman for sex - ignoring me when he had company over, leaving me without regret for the holidays, often simply closing the door to his room so that he could work without my disturbing him. He didn't make time for me. He took me when he wanted me and then coldly walked away. And when he did finally bare his soul - that night in the bar so long ago - I felt nothing. Oh, I gloated over my conquest. Surely that had been my greatest triumph, bringing Ivo to his knees. But once I had him where I wanted him, I didn't want him anymore. He was too much like the others - James and Emily. I had wanted Ivo at the beginning but that was only because I didn't ever think I could have him. I didn't want the Ivo who wanted me.

I sat and analyzed Ivo and Danny's relationship like a psychiatrist or a cameraman shooting and reshooting a scene. I couldn't imagine there were people in the world who loved one another so much they wanted no one else. I couldn't imagine never getting bored with someone. I changed friends almost as frequently as I changed clothing. I tired of them so easily. And yet the evidence to the contrary was in my hands - in the photos of two men who were perfectly suited to one another, changing and adapting year after year. They looked happier together in 1985 than they did in 1981.

I hated Danny. Hated him for having something I had never had, could never have. Hated him for having Ivo first, for ruining Ivo. Because somehow he had ruined him. Somehow he dropped out of his life in 1986 - the year the letters and photos stopped, the year Ivo moved back to England - and Ivo changed and became the broken shell that I was stuck with. I hated him so much I neglected to ask what had become of him in 1986. As far as I was concerned, he had never left. He was here filling up the drawers of the guest room at the cottage where he knew Ivo would be staying with me. He was there to ruin whatever chance at happiness I might have. It filled me with rage. I contemplated burning everything to spite him but realized that would bring up the whole issue of my having found his things. For some reason, I was very afraid that Ivo would discover what I had done. It wasn't just that he would be angry; he had a vicious tongue but I had learned to deal with it. I worried that having Danny alongside me would make him realize how worthless I was. I had spent two years trying to live up to his expectations and finally rebelled, declaring them unattainable. I had forced him to lower his expectations of others. And here was the incontrovertible proof that such standards could be achieved, that such an individual did exist.

I hated Danny for being exceptional. He was everything I wanted to be and more. He was beautiful and enigmatic and creative and talented and so much more. And what was I? Mediocre. A small town boy who chanced to get his name drawn for a writing program. I wasn't even handsome compared to Danny. He was like a painting or a sculpture, one that had been worked on for decades to achieve the perfect balance. I had a feeling even his teeth were perfect, that he didn't have a pimple on his ass. The more I saw of him, the more I hated him. Beautiful people like that shouldn't be allowed to exist to make the rest of us feel inferior. No one had a right to look like that. Had Danny been at Leythe, James would never have noticed me. No one would have noticed me. Danny would have dazzled the entire school.

I lay in bed and clenched my teeth and wished Danny had never been born. By morning I had made myself sick again and Ivo was so alarmed at my state of mind - and very obviously regretting our coming - he began to make excuses for us to depart early. He said the strain of travel and company was too much for me. We had done it too soon. We should have waited until the summer. He said I probably needed to have another chem profile drawn to see that everything was in order, that maybe the change in my meds was making me ill. He tried to spare me humiliation, telling Isabel it was impossible for him to sleep away from home as well and that we both needed to get back to rest before he returned to class on Monday.

I was frantic. I didn't want to go home. I wanted to stay and see what else I could find out about Danny. I had been waiting for the moment I was alone in the house so that I could watch the tapes he'd left behind. I had to stall. I made it a point to get out of bed and interact with the others. I insisted I felt fine, that I was enjoying the break. It was just that I was getting over the flu and still tired easily. I was finally able to participate with the rest of the family and really wanted to stay. Kit had promised to take us sailing and I certainly didn't want to miss out on that. And Ivo had planned a day trip further north to look at the new fossils recently uncovered and we had come all this way and surely he should take advantage of it! My performance was anything but convincing but he reluctantly agreed to finish out the week as originally planned. I made a big to-do about being happy, ingratiating myself to Isabel by helping her in the kitchen, throwing myself at Ivo in bed and even admiring Kit's gun collection. I'm certain they all thought I was certifiable and only humored me for fear that I might go off the deep end completely but I didn't care. I had bought myself a few more days with Danny.

I hid the letters in my pack and took them with me when I bathed or pretended to be working on my novel. I'd found a script of Danny's and read and reread it. I hated to admit it but it was better than anything I had ever written. That he should be talented as a writer as well as everything else was the last straw. The fighter in me surfaced and I turned my attention to the object in our tug-of-war. Danny might have everything in the world but I was damned if he would have Ivo as well. Danny wasn't there and Ivo was mine.

Ivo must have thought he had died and gone to Heaven when I climbed on top of him and guided his cock in me. I'd had trouble getting hard since going on Prozac. Sex, once been the cornerstone of our relationship, was the last thing on my mind after my accident. Usually I lay passively while Ivo did his thing and then I fell asleep. Once I fell asleep during the act which had greatly disturbed him. He'd called my doctor for a lengthy discussion after that and then they had both spent an entire session reassuring me that it was a small thing to give up so that I could have a healthy, balanced life. I could only imagine his confusion that suddenly I wanted him to fuck me senseless like he used to, before all of this happened. I don't know why I wanted him in me, wanted to feel him in me, but I did. It was almost as if this was the only way to break Danny's spell over him. I wanted to fuck him so hard he'd forget who Danny ever was. I must have been really emotionally aroused because not only did I get an erection, I managed to come though it took me awhile. Ivo helped me, putting his own on hold while I squirmed and jacked myself. He came right after I did and didn't bother to clean himself up. It's like he wanted the souvenir of the only decent sex we'd had in more than eight months. I was too tired to get up and clean myself and we fell asleep like that – cuddled up in each other's arms like we used to.

I never got my chance to be alone. My amorousness had so charmed Ivo that he refused to leave my side, convinced we were having another go at our love affair. He insisted on staying with me while I napped – doubtless hoping for a repeat of my spectacular one-shot – and taking me with him to see the McAbee Fossil Beds near Cache Creek. So I spent an entire day that might have been productive on the Danny front learning about 50-million-year-old shales and pretending to be interested that palm trees grew as far north as Alaska then. I took some comfort in the fact that Kit and Isabel were as bored as I was.

I knew that Isabel had known Danny. I had seen pictures of them together at Christmas and Easter. I wondered how well she knew him. I wondered if she adored him as Ivo did. I wondered if she looked at me and knew I failed by comparison. The thought that I had opened my heart to her - when I thought she was just someone I met and not Ivo's spy - made me writhe in shame. I had exposed myself. I imagined they talked about it afterwards - my falling for my lover's sister. I imagined they felt embarrassed by my behavior and apologized for me. I was, after all, _confused_ by my sexuality. Danny would never have done that, have come on to Ivo's sister. Danny loved Ivo and would have seen Isabel as a sister-in-law, which was what she could have been to me. I was depressed realizing that I might have had her as a friend if I had done things differently. I imagined she and Danny had been great friends. They probably went on little day trips like this with Ivo and had so much to talk about: the books they'd read, the movies they had seen. The fact that Danny had been close to her as well as Ivo was too much for me. I was completely despondent by the time we returned to the car and wished I could crawl under it and be dragged home rather than have to sit with the three of them. I heard Ivo tell them that mood swings were normal and that I didn't do well with too much stimulation. That 50-million year old rocks were too stimulating made me indignant but I was afraid to say anything for fear of making it worse. Instead I sat in the front seat and stared out the window. Ivo asked if I wanted to go straight home rather than stop for dinner and I hesitated. The only problem with going home was that I would be stuck in the room with Danny and that would make me feel even worse. I finally told him I just needed a nap and I would feel better. God, the idea that I was some delicate invalid who couldn't manage a family outing made me cringe.

The sailing expedition was even worse. I got sea sick and spent the entire time below deck with my head in the toilet, Ivo hovering over me with towels to clean me up. I knew that Danny had sailed with them – I had seen the pictures of them all laughing and drinking – and the fact that I couldn't even manage to sail properly finished me off. I broke down crying and begged to go home to Warwick, sending Ivo into a veritable panic. He was baffled as to what had happened, what was wrong with me. I didn't know how to tell him that I just didn't want to be there anymore. I didn't want anyone to see me anymore. I cried so hard my eyes swelled shut and Ivo had to practically carry me to bed. He gave me a sleeping pill to knock me out and doubtless spent the rest of the evening in earnest discussion with Isabel about my many mental problems.

We packed the following morning to return to England. He watched me nervously for a while and then went down to make coffee for the road. It was the break I had been waiting for. I quickly grabbed several tapes and as many pictures and letters as I could and stuffed them in my case. I wadded my clothes back on top and managed to get it shut before Ivo reappeared. I was still out of breath and shaking when he walked in the room and he looked surprised but no more than usual by my being out of sorts. I picked up my case and followed him down the stairs, Danny securely tucked inside.

I wasn't finished with my ghost yet. By God this was one battle he was not going to win.


	3. Sinking Sand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tim and Ivo return to England.

 

**Chapter Two: Sinking Sand**

Ivo blamed himself entirely for all that had gone wrong and in penance stayed home most of that first week to wait on me. When I wasn't there with him, I was having another battery of tests run to determine what was wrong with my physiological make-up or speaking with Stan to un-fuck the rampant confusion of my mind. I wondered what Stan would think of my stealing Danny's things but I didn't tell him. Part of my agreement with Ivo was that he be permitted to actively participate in my treatment. This meant that anything said to Stan would likely be transmitted to Ivo as well. I had a suspicion it didn't always go the other way for all Ivo's attending sessions with me from time to time. I got the feeling there was a lot said between Stan and Ivo that I never got to hear. I begin to see this as yet another attempt on Ivo's part to control me. It was even more of an affront to my dignity than having Isabel babysit me in Juneau. I was a grown man but I felt like a woman, a 1950s housewife who had been committed to a mental institution for failing to please her husband sexually. I looked hostilely across the room at Ivo and Stan and thought of Danny's acid comments about "team work". I broke down laughing hysterically without any explanation, thereby cementing my reputation with both of them as completely off my rocker. But I just couldn't stop laughing and in the end Stan threw his notebook on his desk and Ivo took me home and gave me a sedative for my nerves.

Under near constant supervision by either Ivo or Stan or the lab techs, I had no opportunity to sift through my haul from Vancouver. This I resented more than anything else. I had taken a huge risk to appropriate those tapes. I began to see myself as a prisoner and declared war on them by taking up passive opposition. Rather than resist their attempts to convince me I had sexual orientation issues, I went to the other extreme. Succumbing to temptation, I dyed my hair blond and started wearing make-up and nail varnish. I dressed in as feminine a manner as possible without being an out-and-out drag queen. I actually enjoyed dressing up and told Stan that dolly deprivation as a child must have left me with that strong urge. I spent hours on my appearance and found it very arousing. Often I would be lying in bed masturbating, watching myself in the mirror, when Ivo got home. Our sex life improved five hundred percent. Ivo couldn't very well object to my appearance since he was getting what he wanted but I saw that he was very disturbed by my behavior and I was certain he spent most of his office time on the phone with Stan. At any rate he passed on giving a paper as he always did in Glasgow and he took to staying up at night, smoking and drinking whiskey which was very out of character for him. Stan devoted entire sessions to discussing whether love between two men required one to assume a feminine role. I was tempted to ask him if there was any relationship at all that didn't require a person to assume a role. Instead, I told him with as much sincerity as I could pull off that I wanted to bear Ivo's child. This set everyone's teeth on edge and Ivo introduced me to a transsexual friend who took great pains to tell me how hard his – _her_ – life was after the change. He – _she_ – said she would never have done it if she had known. Once it got to that point, I didn't have the heart to tell them I was just fucking with them. I let the matter drop after a while, gradually returning to normal, and they both calmed down.

On Valentine's Day, after an uneventful month, Ivo took me to Paris to the theatre. In spite of myself, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was just like old times. I made Ivo very happy by telling him I loved him. I don't know why I said it. I just felt at that moment that I did love him. He was light again – energetic, enthusiastic, inquisitive, the way he'd been that first day we met. He was fun again and I was desperate for fun . He spent the weekend generously wining and dining and making love to me and by the time we returned to Warwick, I was given the car keys and a credit card again. I immediately used the opportunity to steal away to the public library to watch Danny's films. I didn't trust my luck to view them at home.

I watched the films in order, beginning with his undergraduate masterpiece that had heralded him as The Next Big Thing. _The Little Kingdom_ , a stark black and white short with little dialog, chronicled the life of a boy no older than seven in an impoverished fishing village in some remote northern Canadian province. The child's mother was a well-meaning, uneducated sort who I supposed loved him in her own way. The father was an alcoholic brute who visibly put upon his family though they stayed with him, by necessity if for no other reason. The story's tone, however, wasn't all that depressing. In spite of the grim setting and the absence of any overt happiness in such a miserable squalid place, the little boy passed his days playing as any other child might on the pebble beach, hiding from imaginary pirates in the woods, and sailing sticks in the rivulet that ran from behind the local cemetery through the large duct under the road down to the sea. I guessed the point was to show that even in the most dismal of circumstances, children can have normal lives. It reminded me of a comment Ivo had once made, that there were so many moments of joy in Truffaut's _400 Coups_. I wondered if Danny had said that first. It seemed like something Danny would have said.

 _The Bell_ was a portrait of an artist. A period piece, it was another short shot in color in some fantastically gorgeous location where the wheat grew tall and thick and rolled like the ocean's waves in the strong breeze. The film was like a moving painting – the colors and contrasts so spectacular – and by the end I was convinced that had been Danny's intention: he had reversed the process, making a picture come to life. The title came from the village bell which stood in the square near the only church, tolling languidly, solemnly to announce services and deaths. It's tinny clang ripped through my brain until I had to turn the sound off and watch in silence. The dialogue didn't matter anyway. That wasn't what Danny wanted to show us.

The film lingered on the prettiness of the countryside and then blurred to its conclusion. The painter had become obsessed with his own death, imagining that each time he heard the bell, it was his Maker calling for him. In the end, his fear of possible repercussions for his life's actions was subsumed by his narcissistic addiction for his own demise. While the scene wasn't included, the viewer knows that he killed himself, despondent that he would never hear the bell again. I had no conclusions to draw from that one. I just admired Danny's ability to shoot a really beautiful film. In the category of Art, Danny was an artistic genius. I was more than slightly in awe.

The final of the three films jarred me. _A Crucifixion_ followed the murder of a homosexual teenager in a contemporary small town setting first from the perspective of the killers and then from the perspective of their victim. Again the undertone of religiosity was present, this time in its basest form, serving as a tool of coercion and punishment. Juxtaposed against the intolerance of the killers were the many different church groups in the town. The hatred and suspicion of anything different was applied indiscriminately to outsiders by each group, though they made exceptions for reasons that eluded logic. The Church of Christ tolerated the Lutherans but despised the Catholics. The Lutherans hated the Catholics but mostly from tradition rather than any genuine disagreements; at any rate, they had no problem attending their social functions, they just took snipe shots behind their backs. The Baptists were universally hated for their size and wealth; they were called "corrupt" and "shallow" according to the Puritanical sects. The black churches existed on the other side of the tracks. Blacks didn't have any business in white churches. Oddly enough, the rare Hispanic was admitted into the white fold; Hispanics, I gathered, didn't have the history of slavery so the whites weren't quite sure what to do with them. Jews simply didn't exist. The one Jew in the town had married a Christian woman and spent his days working in his store while she brought his only son up in the church. The others gossiped about him, to be sure, but they let him be.

The utter lack of moral integrity got passed on to the younger generations who, successively working to throw off the oppressive mantle of organized religion, formed their own codes of conduct to stifle individuality. Civilization for the male teenage crowd in this town included abusing alcohol, cats and squirrels, vehicles and women. The group under study had the collective IQ of a dung beetle. The real trouble started when Justin, the boy who became the target of so much pent-up anger, moved to town with his single mother. Justin kept to himself, enjoyed art and reading, and caused a revolution when a picture of a naked boy was found amongst his things in a routine ambush of his school locker. In other words, Justin didn't merely lack local color; his very existence threatened the foundation of civilization as the other boys knew it. He made no effort to disguise himself, to join them and throw them off his scent. Such treason is the substance of blood sport for the masses.

The taunting was painful enough to witness; they regularly stripped him after school and made him run home naked, urinated on him, cut his hair. At one point they held him down and stuffed dog shit in his mouth, taping it shut so that he vomited through his nose until he lost consciousness. His mother was distressed but told him to keep his head down and find ways to ignore them; it was best not to let them break him. Boys will be boys and all that. In the end, furious at their inability to cow him, they strung the helpless lamb up on a wooden cross in a cornfield just outside of town, securing him with razor wire that cut deeply into his naked flesh. How he actually died I didn't find out until some six months later. The film so upset me I couldn't bring myself to watch the second half that featured Justin's perspective. I just took the critics' word that it was very disturbing. And in the interim, I learned something about Danny that would leave me unable to ever forget that film or forgive the thugs in it.

The remainder of the cassettes consisted of interviews with Danny; Ivo's 33rd birthday party on Vancouver Island complete with a drunken sailing expedition; behind-the-scenes footage of Danny working on other people's films; Ivo rock climbing in the Grand Canyon (Danny stayed below to film it: "Thank you but I value my life." "You should value mine as well." "I'm not worried. You have life insurance."); a paper Ivo gave at Columbia University in New York City (they celebrated by having sex in Central Park in the dark, or that is what Danny had proposed anyway – in front of the other attendees). Danny gave Ivo a rare print of a rubbing of the first fossil found in Antarctica. Ivo longed to go to Antarctica. I spent the following week in bed, too depressed to function. My medication was increased and I was unable to get an erection at all. Ivo drank heavily and passed most nights staring moodily out the window, chain smoking. We didn't have sex. We hardly ever spoke.

Life went on and I begin to spend more time watching television and less obsessing over Danny. It upset me too much to think about him. I packed his things away in a box and hid it in the back of the closet. I began to forget about him, more interested in my soaps than his too-realistic drama. The only times I ever thought of him were when I was lying in bed awake with Ivo curled up beside me or when Stan asked me how things were going with Ivo. At those times, I still felt that we really were a threesome, that Ivo was the one who couldn't let go of Danny, that he secretly wished I was him. I started to think that this was how all married couples passed their time – empty shells lying passively on the beach, being turned this way and that by the tides. I started drinking heavily as well which wreaked havoc with the Prozac and led to another round of tests as well as cautions from Stan that I must be aware that alcohol acted on the same chemicals in the brain and might intensify my depression. He recommended I limit my intake while they continued to get the rest of me under control. I waited for Ivo to hide the liquor and cut my allowance. I would have cheerfully jumped down his throat for being a hypocrite. But he surprised me – offering me a nightcap when he had one. I wasn't sure if he was as sick of Stan as I was or if he had just given up. But it pleased me that we had some solidarity – albeit drinking – and I was warmer to him for the next month.

By Easter I had rallied and was deemed well enough to have dinner out with Ivo and Martin. I was relieved to find someone who did not treat me as if I was a bomb about to go off. Still it was clear that Martin was in the know about my condition because not once did he ask me about my own work. But how I loved seeing him again! I hadn't realized that I had missed my friends terribly, that I had given them as well as everything else up when I became Ivo's. I inquired about Emily and our classmates and he told me of their various publications in little-known journals. Most had wandered into other fields. Aaron was studying dentistry and Cal had switched to French literature and a couple of the others had become paper and television journalists. However Emily was teaching Creative Writing in London at a small college, married with a baby on the way, and Sophie Dunbar had done very well for herself, writing a play that actually made it to the stage and got good critical reception. Overall, he was pleased with the group's accomplishments. It was hard to make it in the literary world and at least one had succeeded, which was a credit to him.

I could hear his thoughts – he wasn't surprised that I had done nothing with myself. After all, he had chosen me because my name reminded him of the good time he was having on vacation. I had been the pretty boy in the group, the playboy, the one who caused trouble in the house, the one who took up with a professor. For whatever reason, I felt the need to defend my honor. Martin had been important in my life long before Ivo and I wanted him to think well of me. So I blurted out that I was working on a play of my own, a screenplay actually. It wasn't entirely a lie. I had thought a great deal about Danny's scripts and concluded that that was the direction I wanted to go if and when I ever did decide to try to write again.

I could tell from their polite, embarrassed faces that they both knew I was making it up so I pressed further. "It's about a little boy," I improvised, seeing Danny's character in my mind, "who grows up in a seaside town playing on the beach and in the woods."

Ivo looked as if he had been struck and Martin visibly paused, his fork frozen in mid-ascent. I felt I was a little too close to Danny and that Ivo was remembering so I took a deep breath and a slightly different approach. "He spends his days watching the ships come in, imagining that one of them will take him away from the miserable life he is forced to endure in that suffocating society."

Ivo resumed breathing, albeit shakily. He was deathly pale.

Martin nodded his head, weighing the merit of the concept. "Yes, we all tend to write what we know best," he said sympathetically, thinking I was returning to my own childhood. And then he added, genuinely curious, "Does it have a happy ending?"

"I don't know," I answered softly. "I'm not yet to that point."

A few days later Ivo casually proposed that I consider returning to school to take my Masters. I could work with Martin, get back in circulation so that I had more intellectual stimulation to inspire me. It was hard to write a novel on your own, locked away at home all day. I needed a sounding board. I knew then that he and Martin had already planned it all out. I was torn. The last thing I wanted was yet another person in my life to monitor my progress. At the same time, I was desperate for something apart from Ivo. I didn't know then, wouldn't know for months to come, that Martin had actually known Danny. I didn't know that it was Martin who had actually saved Ivo by bringing him to Warwickshire.


	4. A Soundless Echo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tim finds Danny. And then himself. A little.

  
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_**Chapter Three: A Soundless Echo** _

Martin rarely was on campus, preferring to hold his seminars at home and I was offered a singular privilege - one unheard of for a Masters' student: the exclusive use of his office. I knew I should decline, that it would set me apart when I wanted to fit in, that I was setting myself up for great expectations when I had next to nothing to offer for all the fanfare. But I desperately needed someplace of my own away from Ivo where I could think clearly and not be worried that my relationship with Danny would be discovered. I accepted. I suspected the other students talked behind my back. I saw how they skirted me when I encountered them in the quad, excluded me from their pub sessions and sneered at me for being the favorite. I thought how very much a university was like the small town of A Crucifixion – an established pecking order with so many cliques and rules, conflict was inevitable; if one survived the landmine, there were plenty of bullets to follow. I thought of the line from a Nirvana song, "No recess!".

I was in high school again.

I actually didn't care that I had been ostrasized once again. I didn't know any of the students and I loved my new life. Since meeting Ivo, I had imagined myself as a professor and sitting in a dark cozy room surrounded by decaying mildewed books suited me very well. I had been wrenched away from my own home at the tender age of eight and spent the rest of my life in search of a substitute to fill the void. I found it in Martin's office. In many ways, it was far better than home. I was my own person in my own space. No one could come in uninvited, intrude on my thoughts and activities. I felt grounded in a way I didn't recall ever having been before.

Of course it had its drawbacks. My office was on the same level and directly across the quad from Ivo's. Frequently I would look up and find him staring over at my window. In my worst moods, I imagined he and Martin had planned this as well. Even if he couldn't see me properly, I began to think this was part of his conspiracy to control me. He wanted me in that office to reassure him that I wasn't getting into trouble at home. Of course if he'd known what I was writing he wouldn't have been reassured. I felt victorious in that and it made me nicer to him. Sometimes I would wave just to disarm him. Sometimes I woul play with him as Danny would have. I would telephone him if I knew it was his office hours and he was likely to have a student in there to tell him I was writing something erotic and wanted to have phone sex with him to inspire myself. The pained pause on the other end told me I had scored a point, that he couldn't respond with the first-year looking doe-eyed at him. Still, as I would tell him later at home, he had answered the phone. He could have just let it ring. And unfortunately by evening I was much too tired and not at all in the mood. If giving up Alaska to teach remedial science in summer school wasn't deadly enough, dealing with me in the office drove the nails home. He tried not to sigh too heavily in my presence but I could tell he was miserable.

I wasn't writing erotica or anything remotely like it though I imagined Ivo and Danny together all too often, frequently when I was in bed with Ivo. My obsession with Danny had reached a new level. I spent considerably more time thinking about what I wanted to write than actually writing it. I told Ivo this was called "planning" and that all writers did it. I was certain he thought it was called "bullshit" and that I was stellar at it but he was polite and never asked for any information about my story.

I contemplated finishing what I had outlined for Martin at dinner but I could hardly just steal Danny's story from the film. Even if it didn't feel like I was stealing, even if it had seemed like a bright idea at the dinner table, everybody would know it was his and plagiarism was punishable by publishing death in the academic community. Besides I didn't need to see Ivo's hurt confused face. I was pretty certain bringing Danny up again would send him over the edge. I needed a different approach to my subject matter.

Ivo was right about one thing. I had to have a sounding board. I was so confused running around with Danny in my head. As a last resort I decided upon Stan. I didn't really have any other options and I figured I could camouflage the subject matter so that when it was passed on to Ivo, it wouldn't be obvious. I told Stan that I was interested in human nature, the dark side of human nature - the complexity of the mind, the duality of good and evil. (I was starting to sound like Martin and I was certain Stan was as impressed with my intellectual acuity as I was, given my current dosage.) Actually that part was completely true, I really was interested in the theme. The three films in my possession all revolved around the same convoluted question of the human response to everyday situations. The varying levels of madness – the fantastic daydreams of childhood, the isolation of the artist, the feeding frenzy of mass hatred – had intensified over time and I couldn't help but wonder if Danny had grown increasingly disillusioned with mankind as he aged. It reminded me of a photo I had once seen of an inscription on a barrack wall at Auschwitz: "The more I see of my fellow man, the more I love my dog." I knew Danny would understand.

The more I reflected on the matter with Stan, the clearer it became. I wanted to write my story from Danny's perspective. Stan, poor well-meaning doltish soul, felt I was exploring issues that had been repressed in my memory, events that were somehow too painful for me to broach earlier. With medication and the wonders of modern psychiatric therapy, he felt that I had finally arrived at the point where I could confront my past. I couldn't imagine what the expression on his face would be if I told him about Danny, that I planned to delve into his character and find whatever it was that led him to create the things he did. I wasn't facing myself at all. I had simply found another diversion, another place to hide. I smiled at him at the end of each of our appointments and thanked him for his help, telling him that I felt stronger with each passing day.

The trick to getting under Danny's skin, however, was no mean feat. Of his childhood I knew nothing. I assumed that there were autobiographical elements to the films but for archeological study, his early years were nonexistent; he left not a single record behind from which I could reconstruct the past. Danny for me began his freshman year at Acadia. I knew from his grade reports that he was an indifferent student in most areas, outstanding only in those things that interested him. Not that his interests weren't eclectic. He studied literature and music and theater and art as well as his film classes. Math and science didn't appear to interest him and when I noted the high mark in Introductory Geology and found that it was a course taught by Professor I. Steadman, I raised an eyebrow. Doubtless that high mark reflected the amazing blow jobs he'd given his professor in the faculty toilet. I rather shocked myself with such cynicism - I had no reason to assume that Ivo had ever engaged in illicit relationships with his students - and tried instead to imagine that Danny had some passionate interest in the natural world, something he and Ivo would have shared. I had seen that same ferocity in his camera's eye, the one that possessed Ivo when he was in his element. I suspected that had been the initial bond. I mean, in addition to the fantastic blow jobs.

But for all the easy smiles, coolness and laid-back attitude towards his college career, Danny seemed restless to me, as if he were searching for something though he hadn't figured out what it was. I could feel it in his films. I could see it just beneath the surface of his pale blue eyes. He was discontent. He was uncomfortable in his own skin. He was a lot like me.

I read and re-read his letters digging for references I might have missed. I studied his facial expressions, hoping to better understand what he was feeling in each situation. I began to analyze things as he might have done. I scrutinized my environment, growing quiet and then quieter as I assumed his perspective. I threw away my headphones so as not to be distracted by noise. I began to criticize the work of others much as he had. I adopted his exactitude and watched the films he had worked on as a cameraman. I concluded he was right: at best, they were very flawed. I saw his few acting stints; he usually played some minor mildly deranged character. I wondered if that was an example of what they call "type casting". He seemed mildly deranged to me. I began to imagine myself as mildly deranged as well and took to lying in bed to experience life as a mildly deranged person instead of going into the office as an ordinary graduate student with extraordinary connections. But anyway, I was more interested in feeling Danny than writing about him.

Periodically I would admit to myself that the writing wasn't going well. I was starting to have difficulty separating myself from Danny to be able to write about him. I had lost the ability to be an impartial observer studying my character. I tried to remember what Martin had taught me about narrating in the third-person from the character's perspective but the result seemed hackneyed, unnatural:

_The boy glared at the scene, his eye methodically making the necessary adjustments for the shoot._

I wasn't sure why I called Danny "the boy". Certainly he hadn't been much younger than me back then and Ivo had been a great deal younger so the age difference was not nearly as significant between them. Maybe I just felt old by comparison. The last year had aged me beyond recognition. Still, he was a boy, a little lost boy. I began to think I was a little lost boy as well.

_He required little set-up, relying on the whims of Nature to dictate the course._

That might sound unbearably pretentious but anyone who has ever seen Danny's films would know exactly what I meant when I wrote it. He had an uncanny ability to take the most ordinary scene – a young girl walking away from a house – and make it compelling. He'd shoot in black and white, make it clear or blur it. The girl might glace back so that you could only just detect something indiscernible in her dark eyes, creating an entire mystery that left you with an ominous feeling. Or you might see to the bottom of her soul through her eyes. There might be a second figure just to the edge of the screen, unobtrusive but manifestly lonely so that once again you had to wonder what became of him. And it wasn't just the human characters who gripped you. He had a way of capturing the depth of the sea so that you could feel the crushing power of the waves; of studying the sun's light streaming through the leaves of a tree so that the scene was empty, chilling. A light turning on in a third-story window, altogether superfluous to the storyline, became the indifferent eye of the camera - witnessing apathy in a small town – and then the perspective would shift abruptly again.

I realized that narrating Danny in the third person wouldn't work, _couldn't_ work. He was too alive to be studied that way. He couldn't be contained. He wasn't passive. He was vibrant, demanding, consuming. He ate me alive. He devoured me. I became obsessed with life as he knew it. His interests became my own and I found myself becoming his camera's eye. I allowed his emotions to overtake me. Slowly but surely I felt my own self dying as his came to life. I was frightened but more than that I was incredibly sad to think I was no more, sadder still to think that no one was there to mourn my loss. I became despondent. On one occasion I was so depressed, I actually cried for myself. Seemingly buried alive, forgotten by friends and family, I lay on Ivo's small white bed and sobbed my heart out, a jumble of artistic, hormonal and psychotropic confusion.

Maybe it was just the new meds.

I didn't even hear Ivo arrive home but he came to me swiftly, not even bothering to remove his coat. He took me in his arms at once, kissing my hair, soothing me. He was entirely focused on my well-being but he was possessive - as if he alone owned me, had the right to me. It felt wonderful being curled up against his strong chest. I'd forgotten how strong he was. Ivo was like the heaviness of being drowned in the ocean or the danger of the cracking glacier. He was savage like the starving grizzly and predatory like the lone shark, cunning like a pack of wolves and protective like the killer whale. In Alaska, his strength had frightened me. That surprised me, to recognize that I had feared him back then. I tried to summon that emotion lying there with him but couldn't. I had no visceral memory of it. Nestled against him, I could only think how safe and warm I felt. I was grateful that one of us was strong.

I'd forgotten his kindness, how he would often come to me and simply hold me, stroking me, comforting me. On the Favonia he would often lie down next to me before he retired to his own accommodations to sleep. He'd said then that he didn't have to fuck me, he just wanted to be near me. He just loved being with me. At that time I had regarded him as the source of all my misery. To be loved by him now in such a gentle manner took me aback. I'd forgotten that once I had craved his attention, begged him to be mine. I'd forgotten how much it had hurt me when he closed his door and shut me out. And just as suddenly, my emotions slipping, sifting again and again, I realized how much I wanted him again. Physically wanted him. My body grew hot and heavy in his embrace and I let him kiss my lips. His mouth was soft and warm and smoky, just as it had been the first time he'd kissed me in the lift. I eagerly returned the kiss wishing we were back there, back when things were simple between us, back before the complications of life and Danny. He sensed the change in me and pressed into me. I could feel his hardness against my leg. Not that I was surprised. I suspected he sported an erection much of the time what with my complete lack of interest in sex. Ivo was such a sensual creature. I can't imagine how he went without. It had to have been hell for him, lying with me night after night and not being able to fuck me.

His hand slipped down and caressed my thigh hesitantly. He wanted me. He wanted me but he hesitated. I paused briefly to consider the oddity of that. Our love making had bordered on rape the first two years we were together. He never hesitated. He never asked. He took what he wanted. A year ago - in the beginning, in Alaska - he'd have chucked me down on the floor and fucked me senseless. And now he didn't. It felt strange.

His breath was faster as he felt his way, shifting suggestively into position. I made an encouraging sound, breathing shallowly in his ear. I wanted him to continue. I'd missed his touch all these long months. I'd forgotten how good it felt when I was with him. He groaned loudly, unable to control himself, and mounted me gracelessly, thrusting his crotch against mine. His eyes were darker, liquid, and his face already swollen. I could see he was terribly excited and worried that he might come before he was in me. I wanted him in me. I wanted his seed in me. I wanted something other than Danny in me. I pushed him away and he complied though I could see his confusion, his frustration. I reached out to pull him back and tugged at his belt and then he understood that I wanted to feel the soft heat of his skin against mine. He shed his coat and shirt and turned his attention to me while working at his trousers. I was practically naked already – dressed only in my pyjama pants as was my habit at home. There was never anyone to see me and I had long since given up the formality of dressing. I was only going to be lying in bed anyway.

I felt his hand curl around me and I arched up into it, moaning with pleasure. It had been so long since I'd touched myself. I couldn't remember the last time Ivo had touched me. I guessed it was in the winter, maybe once or twice after that but I really couldn't recall I had been so preoccupied with Danny. But in that moment I couldn't remember anything outside of the immediate. I covered his hand with my own and pressed it down, searching for the friction. It was the first erection I had had in a long while; so frequently was my medication adjusted, it wreaked havoc on my body and brain. Ivo treated it like it was the Golden Calf, fondling it worshipfully, nuzzling it, mouthing it. I wasn't even completely hard but he carried on like it was a gift from Heaven above. It felt wonderful. His mouth was so gentle. I couldn't ever recall him blowing me like that. I sighed happily and my legs straddled his head, the heels of my feet digging into his strong back while I settled into his rhythm.

He slipped his fingers into my mouth, refusing to release me from his own, and I sucked them slick. He inserted one and then the other in me, eventually moving down to tongue the tiny orifice, adding his own spit. He worked at me that way for a while until neither one of us could stand it anymore. He sat up and spit in his hand, rubbing it on his cock and mixed it with his other juices until he was satisfied that he was wet enough. He eased into me and for the first time I felt no discomfort, only pleasure - the pleasure of having him deep inside me, of knowing that that was where he wanted to be, where he belonged. I lifted my legs and pushed back against him so that he could bury himself deeper still. He was shaking and made soft gasping sounds that left every nerve in my body tingling. I felt the hair on my arms and neck and legs stiffen. I felt my cock stiffen. Ivo felt it too and reached down to handle me, slowly so that I shivered from the building intensity. I was so attuned to everything happening to me, every little sensation. I'd never felt so alive. I actually felt his cock grow inside of me. I was being stretched millimetres at most and I could feel it, feel him stretching me. My own blood churned in my brain and his breathing – or mine – was like thunder in a cave. Somehow I was lost and then found in that empty space where only he and I existed, where he and I merged. It had never been this way before. It had never been about me. It was as if I were discovering a part of myself I had never known, as if he were awakening me, introducing me to that unknown me, that me that belonged with him. My balls tightened and pulled up inside of me and I clutched his shoulders, crying out and I felt him as well as myself as we came together.

I lay contemplative in his arms long after he had fallen asleep.

 


	5. Punctured

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tim starts grad school and discovers something disturbing.

_Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after._

Annie Dillard, "An American Childhood"

**Chapter Four: Punctured**

I returned to Warwickshire an official graduate student that September and for the first time found that I was genuinely disturbed by what I was reading. I wondered if sessions with Stan had poisoned my ability to ever read anything again without "finding myself" in it. Our first assignment was Annie Dillard and I hated the book from the onset. Martin wanted us to derive inspiration from "An American Childhood" and recount the development of our own self-consciousness. "Write about what you know," he urged, qualifying it with, "Of course at this age you don't know much."

It was just the sort of assignment he would choose and just the sort of author he would love but I was immediately suspicious. I imagined that Stan had put him up to it. Somehow they were conspiring to force a confession from me about what was going on. But no, Martin didn't know Stan. They did, however, both know Ivo and I grew cold thinking once again that Ivo had managed to trap me. Just as immediately I dismissed that idea; Ivo had witnessed what he perceived to be the fall-out of therapy and felt that I should focus more on school and let the past sleep. He wasn't even that keen on my seeing Stan anymore. He had spent too many nights listening to me cry out in my sleep or wet the bed from near-convulsive shaking. It couldn't have been Ivo. Martin was simply determined to torture me.

Annie Dillard had "slid into herself perfectly fitted". I was fairly certain Martin had slid into himself at an early age. Ivo was that sort as well; I'd seen his baby pictures and he looked very much as he did today - a tiny, youthful intellectual. Isabel said that by the age of six Ivo was organizing his collection of rocks according to size, shape, color, and date of acquisition. Isabel was very much in her own skin. And what a fashionable skin it was! I was absolutely positive Danny slid out of the womb already in his own skin and forced everyone around him to adapt accordingly. But me? I had never fitted anything – my own clothing let alone self. I had never fit anywhere. I had nothing of my own and suddenly wished I had no consciousness. I had spent my life trying on different skins, different shells really for they were hard and awkward not smooth and natural. I shed them continually, not like a snake growing into its new size but like a hermit crab scrabbling to find a new hiding place. When I was at home, I was little Tim Cornish, the boy who played all by himself in the run-down estate house or Tim Cornish, the young gentleman who got a college scholarship or Tim Cornish, the man who lost his father and whose poor mother was wasting away. When I was at school, I was "Timmy", and known for my pretty boy looks and willingness to do virtually anything. At Warwickshire, I was just "Tim" the charmer who never had to ask for sex; people just kept showing up in my bed. Except Ivo. I had to work to get Ivo. Following him into the lift, going to his office, showing up at his house. I guess that constituted self-assertion. That thought confused me more than any other. That I had acted to get Ivo.

Annie Dillard was an author with the gift of self-expression. Martin felt we all had that potential but I felt too much like a skeleton on display to have any inkling of which expression I might take. I wasn't really sure I felt anything of my own. I knew how Danny felt. Sometimes I thought I knew how Ivo felt. Emily had never stopped talking about how she felt so I was quite clear on that. But as for me? I knew how people reacted to me but I had no idea what I actually thought prior to that moment. I felt like everything I did was just reaction to somebody else, as if I were a limp body on the table being jolted with electric shocks. I wasn't certain I had ever taken a single action of my own. Well apart from chasing after Ivo. But that had just taught me that I had no idea what I really wanted.

To figure myself out I needed to be left alone and that simply had never happened. I needed them to go away, Ivo and Danny and Stan and mother and Aunt Clarissa and the good citizens of Aldeburgh and Warwickshire. I thought a moment and then added Isabel to the list. That got me remembering that Ivo had been behind that encounter as well and suddenly I felt like a puppet on a string. This inspired me to compose a tirade about "The Pinocchio Paradox" which probably wasn't what Martin had in mind. So I was stuck with nothing to hand in for Tuesday's class. At least no one could accuse me of prolificity.

God I hated them all! Bad enough they should interfere in my life but to prevent me from meeting a deadline was simply too much. I sat back down to try again. I decided to look at myself as I was in someone else's eyes. The only one I could think of was Ivo so I analyzed my relationship with him much as Stan might. Examining the events from that first day I saw a pattern that culminated in my accident and subsequent depression. I decided I had been pretty happy up until Ivo. Maybe happy isn't the right word. I was pretty normal up until then. Everything became abnormal once my affair with Ivo began. Maybe Stan had a point that my sexual preferences were confusing me. Ivo was turning me into something I didn't want to be. He made me a woman when I very much wanted to be a woman's man.

I stopped abruptly. How had I gotten off on a discussion of my sexuality? But too late because I realized that Ivo hadn't been the first, that I had done the same with James at the tender age of 8, already a coquette to an older gentleman. At the time it had seemed perfectly natural. It was something everyone did at school - like stealing sweets or smoking joints or not washing much. But now it sat uncomfortably with me. Now it felt like sodomy and pedophilia. I began to think that maybe that was what was wrong with me - that that experience had made me "homosexual" when I might otherwise have been normal. An uneasy feeling gripped my stomach. I felt dizzy, sick. I tore the paper up and lay down on the floor, the cold worn wood smooth and reassuring against my cheek. I don't know how long I lay there but the next thing I knew Ivo was shaking me awake. I laughed when I saw the alarm in his eyes and told him I had gotten sleepy and couldn't sleep in the chair. Martin didn't have a couch. He pointed out that I might have gone home to sleep. I told him I had forgotten my key and didn't want to disturb him. He accepted the lie and we walked home in silence together. I could see he was troubled but we didn't speak of it again. We had a light dinner and I retired early. He stayed up smoking until well past midnight.

Tuesday morning the pressure was on and I had to come up with something. Leythe was off limits as was Ivo, James or anything to do with sex so I sat and reflected unhappily on my early childhood. Life for me had started in Aldeburgh. I suppose I should say life for me had ended in Aldeburgh. My mother stopped trying to understand me when I turned six and I had written her off about that time as well. I don't really have any memories before then. Memories are formed by people speaking of past events and we never spoke of those. We both wanted to forget the terrible mistake that was us. Neither did I have much of a relationship with my father. He had wanted my mother and she had wanted me so he went along with it. He was much older than she and had no patience for a baby or a young boy. My mother actually didn't either but she had to have me before she figured that out. Or maybe I was just a great disappointment and that was why she changed her mind about wanting me. She had wanted a son she could be proud of and I was thin and timid. She liked to bathe in the ocean but I screamed when she put me in the cold water. She was athletic and ran up and down the beach but I liked to sit quietly alone and draw things in the sand. She liked to be with her friends, at their houses, out places with them, but I didn't want to be friends with her friends' children. They were cruel and taunted me because I didn't like the things they liked. In the end she did what all parents who were far more interested in things other than their offspring did: she shipped me off to the other side of the country to school so that she and my father could get on with their lives.

When I was a child, I wanted to be a professional violinist but I was never good enough. Or rather, my mother had wanted me to be a professional violinist and dutifully put me in lessons to achieve that goal. My father had no ambitions for me, at least nothing overt. I enjoyed reading the books he did not. Or perhaps I enjoyed reading them because he did not – defiance of his dislike for Tolstoy's gloom and Dostoevsky's animal abuse. I thought perhaps I had become a great reader because of my father. But I wasn't a great reader at all. Hadn't the others said as much when I joined the program? Ivo had pointed out that I wasn't really well-read as I had neglected entire areas – philosophy and science for a start. I had read a "few plays and pieces of poetry". And even he, a scientist, had read far more than I, devouring novels contemporary and classic in his spare time.

I was neither a great reader nor a great musician. What had I wanted to be? I thought back to Leythe where my sole purpose was attracting the attention of the prefects. I had James licking my feet – and my dick – but I had set my sights on better things. I had always wanted to bag my teacher. Could that truly have been my ambition? To lure an older man into my bed? Stan would say this was Freudian and I was trying to gain power over my father. I just thought it hilarious that someone as sexless as I had used my looks to get through school. It reminded me of the only job offer I had after Leythe, before Warwickshire. An older woman had told me to give modeling a go, that any woman would understand that using her looks was just as legitimate as using her brains to earn a living. I replied coldly that I was no woman and I certainly didn't believe women wished to be exploited - spreading their legs on the bonnet of a gleaming car set against the Alps to entice men to imagine the euphoria of fucking in a breath-taking environment while driving the latest model of Porsche. I wound up fucking her in her hotel room, an experience I found thoroughly nauseating. There was something about her thick crimson lipstick that made my stomach churn. It was the first time I had ever fucked a woman, the first time I was not the one being fucked. It cemented my absolute hatred of sex.

I realized I had never spoken of that part of my life to anyone – not to Ivo or Stan or any of the other passing strangers in my life. Most people speak of their extended family to their lovers, because family is so much a part of self-definition. Most people introduce their families and lovers to one another. Emily had wanted to do that before she married me – take me to meet her parents. I had replied, baffled, "What on earth for?" I was as astonished by her wanting me to come home with her as I was by her announcement that we were practically engaged. I have never wanted to bring anyone home or introduce my family to anyone else. I put up with them because I had no other choice. Ivo knew my father had died and that my mother was ill because I had told him that just after I first met him, when he came to Aldeburgh to visit me that New Year's. I didn't want him to meet my mother and he had not pressed the matter, sensing something wrong. He knew I had been shipped off to school because I told him that was my first gay experience and that I didn't really consider my parents to be actual parents. They were just sort of relatives, the way Aunt Clarissa was a relative.

I knew he had a sister because he had kicked me out of the flat at Easter when she came to visit and I had had an awful time at home that week alone with my mother. That was our first fight and the last time we ever mentioned anything about our prior lives. I had been left feeling hurt and abandoned. He seemed cold, harsh, telling me I was a spoiled prat because Sugar Daddy couldn't give me everything I demanded. I would never confide in him again. From that point on we talked about school and academic interests and my lack of intellectual curiosity and woefully inadequate education and then the mundane aspects of life – what we needed from the grocer's, travel plans, etc. Mostly we didn't talk, we just had sex. Lots and lots of sex. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that sex was pretty much the only relationship I had with Ivo. When he was away from me, I would be so _physically_ lonely I would bring home perfect strangers. He'd return, hurt and upset by my infidelity, we'd fight, and then we'd have sex to make up. Sex drove us apart and then pulled us right back together. With Ivo, I wasn't homosexual or bisexual or anything other than just a sexual entity who desperately needed him.

Until I met his sister.

 _Isabel._ I stared at the blank paper beneath me. I had spoken to Isabel, told her of my feelings as I had once told Ivo before he shut me up. She was, apart from Ivo, the only other person with whom I had ever been honest. Well, not entirely honest. After all, I was Ivo's lover at the time and I neglected to mention that when courting her. Of course she had known who I was but I had had no idea who she was. So I guess she was equally dishonest which put us on a level playing field. I would make it a point to remind myself of that the next time I saw her so I wouldn't feel so ashamed of my own actions. She was more than a little guilty in the whole sordid affair.

Still, how odd that I had behaved the way I did with her. With Isabel, it wasn't about sex and it had always been that way before when I'd taken up with someone to keep the loneliness at bay. I never slept with Isabel. And I loved her. In an astonishing moment of epiphany I realized that that was why Ivo had felt so threatened. When I was out fucking someone, it bothered him but he got over it. It was just the way I was, he said. But with Isabel I had poured my heart out and it terrified him. It made him realize that this was no passing fling, that he had real competition for the first time. Because of course I once had poured my heart out to Ivo. Not about my past, but about my fears of the future and my desperate longing for a stable relationship with him. I had begged for a relationship with him. I had been madly in love with him and agonized by his indifference toward me. I had given him the same chance I had given Isabel and he had chosen to push me away, to debase me, to make me nothing more than his bed warmer.

I realized something else. I understood then why had I spoken so openly to her, a perfect stranger in a dark bar in a remote corner of the world. At the time I had imagined myself in love with her. We had so much in common. She was comfortable to be with. But then I realized that she was just like Ivo. And then again she was nothing like him. With Ivo I had to prove myself, be something he wanted me to be. I could never be good enough for him, never have the broad education he wanted me to have. He was a cold disappointed parent. Had he once been different? I had craved him then as I sometimes still did. He accused me of looking for a father figure and maybe that was it. But in the beginning he hadn't seemed like a parent. He had been a lover and a friend and a confidante. How had that changed so quickly? When had we started to go downhill? It wasn't abrupt. Nothing in life is that abrupt. He had changed. He had told me he loved me and he had changed.

I looked at the clock. Class was in fifteen minutes. I looked at my paper. I had nothing to say. I called Ivo and told him I wasn't feeling well and needed to go home. I wouldn't make it to class and would he call Martin and explain for me? I gathered up my things, knocking Martin's pile to the ground in my carelessness. Some of the papers had slid between the desk and the wall. I reached down to wrench them out, banging my head on the corner in the process. I was already tired and unhappy and feeling put upon. I didn't need anything else to make it worse. But of course it did get worse. Much worse.

Amongst the papers I retrieved was a note in a handwriting I knew better than my own. Danny's. A letter to Martin from 1984. I sat down heavily on the floor. I didn't get up for a long time.


	6. Scar Tissue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tim finds an ally.

 

**Chapter Five: Scar Tissue**

When I was a child I was frightened of balloons. I feared the screech when they were being inflated, the unnatural stretching of the rubber skin, and the terrible sound they made when they popped. If I saw one traveling close to the ground I would cover my ears and close my eyes tightly in anticipation of its impending doom; it was only a matter of time before it snagged on a branch or bumped the grass beneath it and then POW! I would quake in fear just being near it.

More than anything else I feared the shelf-life of balloons, watching them day after day as they slowly deflated and drifted aimlessly, lifelessly, across the floor. Sometimes it would take as long as a week for them to die if they were filled with helium. They would hover above the ground, sinking lower and lower until they sagged pitifully on the worn carpet, unable to pick themselves up again. I hated myself for being so cowardly. I should have had the strength to pop the balloon and put it out of its misery. But I couldn't. I would open the windows and hide under the stairs and pray the sea breeze would be strong enough to move it to another part of the house where I wouldn't have to witness its agonizing death.

I felt like a balloon, sitting on the floor of Martin's office reading Danny's note, hovering superfluously above the scuffed wood of the floor. They were headed to Berlin for a film festival. Martin was credited with editing the screenplay so he was to be there as well. They already had reservations at the hotel. He needed to arrange his flight, that was all. Ivo and Danny would meet him at the hotel and they would catch a cab together to the screening. Danny wrote confidently, matter-of-factly, succinctly. He was as he always was - the master of his environment: taking charge of all the details, giving orders as if it were all in a day. Martin would never dare to suggest he didn't wish to come. No one would have contradicted Danny's directives. He was such a strong person, a strong personality. The weak, the _weaker_ , automatically caved in his presence. I was weak. I'd been born weak and grown weaker with each passing year. I was like a little deflating piece of stretched-out rubber wafting aimlessly through life. I wished Danny's pen would rise up off the paper and stab me, finish me so that I wouldn't have to drift for days in this moribund state - a tortuous end to a tortured existence.

Martin had known Danny.

Disbelief, dismay filled me. How naïve I had been. I forced a laugh. It really was comical. How stupid to think that Martin had somehow taken an interest in me as a student. Martin was, after all, Ivo's friend. _Danny's_ friend. Martin was the reason I knew Ivo. He'd practically introduced us to one another. It was probably even his idea that Ivo meet me. He probably said, "Oh Ivo! I have a young undergraduate you simply must meet!" I imagined that Ivo had been filling him in on our little soap opera from the get-go. Martin knew I wasn't "sub-letting" a room from Ivo. Ivo had wanted me and doubtless Martin had proposed that he arrange for me to lease a room so that no one would get suspicious. Oh how perfectly everything fitted together now. What perfect sense it all made.

What a fool I was. Bitterness and anger seeped like venom into me, filling the hole created in childhood. I had trusted Martin, thought of him as my friend. But really I had no friends, did I? No one of my own. I only had what Ivo had, what Ivo wanted me to have. Ivo had been behind every person I met and those he couldn't control he got rid of quickly enough. That was why I hadn't maintained any of my former friendships. _Acquaintances_ …

Isabel. And now Martin. So much for my future as a writer or a professor. I wouldn't be in this program much longer. In spite of my tumultuous state, my mind began to follow a remarkably logical progression. I sat and rationally considered my options as a normal person might. I wondered what other uses there might be for an English BA. I thought I might try my hand at journalism or technical writing. I might try editing as Martin had done for many years. Maybe I could edit screenplays for people like Danny. Maybe I could teach at a preparatory school. That made me think of Leythe and I begin to laugh. Maybe I could bugger little boys and ruin them the way I was ruined. Damage them and perpetuate the problem so that no one got away unscathed. That would be my revenge.

But, no I could never do that. I'd kill myself before I did that. Kill myself? The one time I had tried to kill myself I had wound up more firmly in Ivo's grip than before. And I hadn't even consciously been trying to kill myself. It was an accident. I sighed and banged the back of my head repeatedly against the wall. I couldn't stay in the office one second longer. Martin's betrayal cut me deeper than anything ever had before. I was bleeding to death. I was punctured, deflating slowly, pathetically. But I couldn't go home. Ivo was at home. I clenched my jaw. Ivo! I wished he was dead! I would never speak to him again. I'd never see him again. And to think I had lain in his arms last night, responded to his touch. I felt sick. I was a whore. I thought back to the only job interview I had ever had and laughed louder. Yes, Ms. PR Woman, I had indeed learned to use my body to support myself. I was Ivo's mistress. I wondered errantly if Danny had been as well. Perhaps Danny had just grown too long in the tooth and Ivo had booted him out in search of younger flesh. I wondered how long it would be before he tired of me, before I was no longer desirable. They all liked pretty boys – the Jameses and Ivos of the world. So long as we were cute and young and took it up the ass, they'd support us. James gave me cigarettes and sweets. Ivo paid my bills. I decided that I preferred James. At least I didn't have to actually live with him and ask for every nickel I got. Suddenly I had the urge to go home, to dress provocatively and strip for Ivo. See if that excited him, made up for all the whining and lack of sex he had had to put up with lately. I could only imagine the expression on his face. "Let me guess? Our Lady of the Flowers? All dressed up for the rent-boys' ball?" And the corner of his mouth would twitch.

Danny had had a better deal. At least he had some independent income. At least he got to travel away from Ivo. I needed to get away from Ivo.

I considered catching a train home. Home? That sounded so strange. I hadn't been back to Aldeburgh in more than a year. Mum was in Sunnylands and the house was empty. It was mine. All mine. I could go there, move back in, start all over again. Of course I didn't actually have a job yet but I didn't care. I'd be away from Ivo. Standing in Martin's office I knew I would rather starve in the street than go back to Ivo.

Furious, I left the building to wander aimlessly. Of course it started to rain and I hadn't brought my umbrella. I didn't care. Being wet and cold was preferable to being safe and warm in Ivo's clutches. I walked for hours. It was dark and I wasn't sure how much longer I could keep it up. I was hungry as well as cold and wet. I glanced around and recognized the street. I was only a block from Stan's office. I thought that I might curl up under the awning and stay there until he showed up. Suddenly I very much wanted to talk to Stan, tell him what Ivo was really like. For some reason I felt he would listen. For some reason I thought he would be fair to me.

I was crying by the time I reached the steps to his office door. There's nothing quite like being hungry, cold and wet to make you feel really sorry for yourself. I not only felt like a victim, I looked like one. I sat down heavily against the door and bawled until my ears clogged up. That Martin could have done this to me! He had always seemed so ideal – a patient elderly fatherly type. I realized I thought of Martin as a father figure, wanted him as a father. That made me think of Ivo's comment: "Did you see me as a father figure?" The idea that Ivo could be fatherly. What a mockery he made of everything. I wanted to claw him until his face bled. Martin was a father. Had been. Until he betrayed me. But Martin had known all along. I let out an anguished scream, trying to expel the last bit of life left in me.

I felt the door open and jumped though I knew instinctively it was Stan. No one else would be there that late at night. He took one look at my deplorable state and moved aside to let me in. I stood but remained under the stoop. I felt guilty stepping on his carpet and making it sopping. It always made Mum and Ivo testy.

"I'm wet," I mumbled apologetically, feeling his expectant look on my face.

"I'll get a towel," he said and returned seconds later with a large white fluffy one. I wiped uselessly at my jacket and jeans but he stopped me. "Dry your face and hair. The rest will take care of itself."

I did as I was told and followed him into the reception area.

"I'll turn the heat on," he offered, "Help you get dry."

I nodded and stayed where I was.

"Are you hungry?"

I was ravenous! I nodded again.

"I'll see what I have upstairs."

I waited in place for him to return. He did, some ten minutes later, a bowl of steaming soup in his hands. "Come sit down," he called and I followed him into his office.

I sat and ate. "It's good!" I exclaimed, not simply because I felt that something needed to be said to break the silence but because I was very surprised. Ivo was the only man I knew who cooked.

"My wife made it," he smiled at me. I smiled back. I had no idea Stan had a wife. I knew nothing about him. But isn't that how it is supposed to be with psychiatrists? They aren't friends. They're doctors.

"It's good," I repeated. A compliment to his wife this time.

He paused the way he often paused in sessions and I knew what was coming. "Ivo called me earlier."

I sighed. Of course he had.

He pursed his lips in thought and continued. "You didn't tell him where you were going. He was worried."

"He's not my father," I said angrily. "I'm an adult. I don't have to tell him where I'm going."

"No, he isn't your father. But he is someone who cares about you."

"He'll get over it." I didn't care that I sounded like I was sixteen. I still hated Ivo too much to care if I caused him pain.

"Of course he will," Stan allowed. "But he is worried."

"No," I corrected. "He's upset that he won't get to fuck me tonight." It sounded harsher than I intended. I had no interest in shocking Stan. It wasn't his fault Ivo and Martin were shits. "I'm sorry," I said meekly. I didn't need a fight with Stan when I was already at war with everyone else.

"You don't need to be sorry. You can say whatever you like. I'm not here to judge you."

"It's just that - " I blurted out before stopping myself. How in the world could I explain everything? How could I explain Danny and Ivo and Isabel and the mess that was my life?

He waited patiently.

I shook my head. "Ivo wants something to fuck at the end of the day and I don't want that anymore." I stopped myself again. Had I ever wanted that?

"Is that what you believe?"

I gave a contemptuous scoff. "Yeah. I'm his mistress really. He supports me and I let him fuck me."

Stan reflected on that, appearing neither shocked nor surprised by my words.

"What?" I challenged him. "Did you think he was 'in love' with me? Is that what he told you?"

"He and I don't talk much about that. He expresses concern for your well-being and I tell him how I think you are progressing."

I narrowed my eyes and made another scornful sound but actually I was dying to know what Stan and Ivo said about me. "'Progressing'?" I repeated with as much disdain as I could muster.

"Yes." He paused again before firmly pushing his chair back to open his desk drawer and remove a large plain envelope. He looked at it briefly and then handed it to me. "Here. This is my correspondence with Ivo."

It was my turn to be surprised. I had never expected that. I thought I should grab it from his hand, rip it open, find out exactly what the two of them had been saying about me. Instead I hesitated. It felt wrong. I didn't want to read the remarks in front of Stan. I didn't want him to see my reaction. "I'll take your word for it," I muttered.

He left the envelope on the table between us. "How did you meet Ivo?" he asked simply.

Martin, I thought to myself and the pain welled up in me again. I was afraid to speak. I was afraid I might start crying again. I felt for a cigarette in my pockets. It was my only crutch when I was in sessions with Stan and Ivo. Mine were wet so he handed me one, saying that as a doctor he disapproved. We both laughed at that and I felt a bit better. He could disapprove all he wanted. I took a deep drag and relished it.

He waited patiently for my response and I knew I needed to answer. "He was a professor in a building where my professor was," I said, hoping that would be the end of it. It wasn't.

"Did he know your professor?"

Boy did he. I nodded and inhaled as if I were trying to consume the entire cigarette in one go.

Stan waited. I wished I could change the subject. "And that's it. We just bumped into one another in the elevator. I recognized him from Mar—from my professor's office and - " I shrugged. I wasn't about to explain that I had touched Ivo before I ever spoke to him.

"They were friends then?" he deduced. Ah, psychiatrists!

I grunted. 'Conspirators' was more like it.

"But your professor wasn't the one who introduced you?"

I shook my head. I felt like saying he might as well have. Probably Ivo had planned the whole thing, meeting me in the elevator. No, I had followed him into the elevator. I was getting confused again as to how it had happened.

"Did he ask you out?"

I burst out laughing remembering how I used to sit by the phone practicing for the moment when Ivo called to ask me out.

"What?" He was laughing too though he wasn't in on the joke.

I smiled, a genuine smile. "I used to think he would ask me out." I bit my lip coyly though I had no idea why when Ivo wasn't there. "I didn't know anything about being gay. I didn't know what gay guys did."

"You've got me," Stan replied easily, "I'm not gay."

It was on the tip of my tongue to say I wasn't either but for some reason I didn't. I grew sober again. He watched me inquisitively. "No," I repeated firmly, wanting the conversation to end, "He never asked me out. We just went straight to bed."

"His idea or yours?" He had a way of asking questions that made you want to answer truthfully. But I couldn't bring myself to. Of course the idea had been mine. I just shook my head and added a shrug. He tried another approach. "Whose idea was it to move in together?"

Why that would have been Martin's, I thought angrily, but in truth I had already been living there. I just needed a place for my things once I told Emily to piss off. Martin had mentioned the room in Ivo's flat and Ivo and I had celebrated with champagne and ferocious love making that night. "He had an extra room." I was certain he knew I was editing my responses.

"Were you just flatmates then at first?"

No. Ivo had made it seem that way some of the time, when he had friends over or when he was busy with work. I was the one crying and begging for him to be my lover. I didn't answer the question.

"I actually don't know Ivo very well," Stan confessed. "I know you much better because I see you every week. I see him when he comes with you and once in a while he calls to tell me about something that concerns him. Like when you were playing with him and pretending to be a transvestite." He smiled at me. I had to laugh. Count on Stan to know I was just fucking with Ivo.

"You knew about that?" I threw the packet of matches at him playfully.

"I'm not blind, Tim," he said quietly.

"Why didn't you tell him?" I was baffled. This was a Stan I didn't know at all.

He shook his head. "That isn't my job. My task is to help you. You wanted to provoke him and I let you do what you needed to do. In the end there was no harm done to anyone and you learned something about yourself."

That got my attention. "What did I learn?" I certainly couldn't guess what it might be.

"That nothing you could do would drive him away," he said and he was suddenly serious. I didn't care for the change in tone.

"I'm tired," I said abruptly. "Can I sleep here?"

He reflected on that. "You may. But I want you to do one thing first."

I had a feeling I wasn't going to like it. "What?"

"I want you to call Ivo and tell him where you are. For all he knows you are lying dead in a ditch somewhere. It's not fair. Whatever happens, it's not fair to leave him wondering. Just call him and tell him you need some time alone."

That may have seemed simple to Stan but it wasn't. I knew that with Ivo nothing was that simple. I shook my head. "He won't let me stay. He'll come get me." I waited for him to argue but he didn't.

"Would you permit me to call him then?"

I thought about it a moment. Ivo might listen to Stan. He'd hired him after all. I nodded.

"Alright," he said softly, rising from his chair, "Let's find some linens for the sofa." And he disappeared into the flat again.

I couldn't believe it. I was finally away from Ivo. I told myself that I should feel victorious, that I was actually rid of him, that I had gotten what I wanted.

Instead I wondered what he would say when Stan called him.


	7. The Pouring Fire

 

**Chapter Six: The Pouring Fire**

It was more than a year later that Ivo told me what had happened that night - how when he found I hadn't come home he returned to the office and there discovered my things exactly where I'd left them on the floor, Danny's letter included. He had phoned Martin in a panic, angry to find Danny so carelessly left about. He had never wanted me to know about him. They had a terrific row and Ivo said that if anything happened to me because of Martin's stupidity -

I know Ivo's temper well enough to know that he meant it. He could be incredibly violent when threatened. I know Martin well enough to know that he would have been stunned to be addressed this way by the man who doted on him. It's funny but I never knew how incredibly close they were. They were the original odd couple. Martin was peevish and irritable and Ivo jollied him out of it. Martin looked after Ivo and Ivo permitted it. Martin scolded Ivo and Ivo placated him. Martin corrected Ivo, and Ivo - who was very nearly always right - let the matter drop. How must Martin have felt to suddenly be on the receiving end of Ivo's lashing tongue?

Shortly after that Ivo called Isabel to accuse her. He didn't trust her on the subject of love and suspected that her good intentions - her invasive, meddling, womanly ways - had led her to tell me everything about Danny, to help me "understand" Ivo. She was of course innocent but informed him that Danny's things were missing; she had assumed he had taken them when we were in the cottage on Vancouver Island. And why in the world would he do that? he snapped, furious that she hadn't told him earlier. She replied that she had thought he was "coming to terms with it" and hadn't wanted to interfere. I can only imagine Ivo's response to that. She did offer to fly over but Ivo told her thank you, no, she had done enough damage.

Next, he called Stan, almost hysterical by that point. He was convinced I had done something rash. I was still very unstable for all the improvement over the summer. He couldn't imagine where I could have gone. What should he do? Stan promised to call him if he heard from me. And Stan did call him, several hours later.

The very next day, Ivo and Martin conducted a thorough search of both the flat and the office. Ivo felt this explained a great deal about my behavior and was livid with everyone for the part they played in it. They unearthed my Danny stash and Ivo sat down to cry. For me, not for Danny. He'd stopped crying over Danny long ago. Then he called Stan again to fill him in on what was going on with me.

I knew none of this, of course. Stan has one of those inscrutable faces that tells you nothing. Someone once said psychiatrists were to be a mirror image, serving as a tool to help the patient identify what was wrong. Stan was an excellent psychiatrist. I never knew what he thought of me or Ivo or anything else for that matter. And I certainly never knew he knew my secret.

He'd called Ivo in my presence that night, told him I was there, that I was tired and needed to sleep and asked that he bring round a fresh change of clothing for me in the morning. I could only hear the one side of the conversation but I imagined that Ivo was first relieved and then very business-like as he always was in a crisis. I was glad for the clothing request – I really needed to get out of my wet things. And I really wanted to see Ivo though I didn't understand it that way at the time. I felt uncertain being away from him. We'd spent the night apart before but it was always with the certainty that we would be back together soon thereafter. Standing in Stan's office, there was no such certainty. I might never see Ivo again. That thought frightened me as much as the prospect of seeing him again did.

Maybe it was that call or sleeping in a strange place or remembering or simply the whole miserable experience of that day that felt like everything coming _rushing_ to a head but I dreamed about Ivo that night in vivid color. I say color but the entire scene was shot in black and white. It was textured rather than colored. Textured the way Danny would have shot it. I say "shot" because when I awoke I realized that it had been a film and that it couldn't hurt me. At the time, though, I felt as if I were actually in the ocean rather than watching it, drowning in the ocean. Or burning, I suppose I should say. It was very real.

I dreamt that I was back on the coast and though very much myself my stature was small, as if I were a child again. The sea wall was too high for me to climb and it took a great many attempts before I was able to find footing and kick myself up to the top. The sea was flat and silvery, a calm glistening surface in the moonlight. Like the quiet before the storm, I mistrusted it. The sea in our region is rarely calm and certainly not in winter and sure enough no sooner had I made the decision to flee back to the safety of the town when the waters parted and Ivo reared up like a great dog. Like a dog he shook to rid himself of the water's weight and I saw how thin and sickly he was. His face was broken and bloodied and he was blind – the sockets where his eyes once were gruesome and gaping like hungry mouths. He was hurt and howled in pain like some terrible banshee. I covered my ears waiting for the moment when he would rise even higher out of the water and descend on me but as swiftly as he appeared, he retreated, his sad empty face watching me sightlessly as he drifted further and further out to sea. Though far from me I could see him clearly, his absent eyes on me. I wanted to speak to him, to explain myself, to defend myself, but could not find my tongue. I stared transfixed, helpless in his tired, weary hold. *

Then came Danny, shrouded in light so that at first I mistook him for an angel. He was clothed and dry and moved soundlessly toward me. He came to me and bent down alongside me and let me touch him, lowering his head so that I was able to run the back of my hand down his cheek, under his jaw. He let me caress his neck and chest. I marveled at his beauty. Then I looked back at his face and realized there was something covering it. I touched it again and saw that it was a bandage. This I pulled away to find that he too was injured, a long gash marring his perfect features. I gasped as heat began to pour out of the wound. It burned me and I jerked away in fear and loathing. He withdrew, looked harshly at me - his expression one of cold contempt - and then turned to follow Ivo out to the ocean's depths. He took his lover in his arms, kissed his blind eyes, gently pulled the seaweed from his corpse. And Ivo wept at his kindness. They clung to one another, pale wistful limbs wrapped indiscriminately so that they appeared to be one being rather than two.

The last thing I remember was Danny glaring accusingly at me over the back of Ivo's head, his hair matted and foul. I woke in a cold sweat. Stan was standing over me with a glass of water. I took it gratefully and downed the contents in one gulp. My flesh felt charred and I was terribly thirsty. He replenished it and I drank that too.

I was very upset and desperately needed to tell someone so I just started talking. "Ivo had someone before me," I said. It came out rushed, all in one gasp as if I'd been holding my breath, as if I were confessing to murder.

He nodded and went to sit down at his desk. I thought to myself that that was his station in life. Nothing ever surprised him. He had a way of throwing water on the fire, of making everything calm and rational when you didn't feel capable of calm and nothing about you was rational. "Did you have someone before Ivo?" was his response.

I never got Stan back then. Why did he always answer me with another question? How was my life relevant to the discussion at hand, to Danny and Ivo? "No," was my short and rather irritated answer. And then remembering Emily, I qualified it. "Well, I had a girlfriend for a few months." The distraction pulled me away from my immediate terror.

He waited.

"She wasn't actually my girlfriend."

He raised his eyebrows in curiosity.

"She was my flatmate."

"A marriage of convenience," Stan smiled.

"Yeah." I laughed. "Actually she thought we were getting married.

He raised his eyebrows again.

"She thought that since I slept with her we were common-law husband and wife."

Stan looked perplexed. "Isn't that a 19th century law?" he asked.

It was my turn to laugh. "I've no idea. I couldn't believe it when the entire house tried to force me to marry her just for sleeping with her. _Writers_." I rolled my eyes.

He smiled and then surprised me again. "There were others in the house."

"Yeah, four of us." And then I remembered. "That's why I had to move out. Why I had to move in with Ivo. They kicked me out."

"They kicked you out for not marrying her?" He seemed to find it entertaining as well.

"Yeah." I felt rather indignant again, that the three of them had ganged up on me, made me out to be a villain.

"Getting involved with a flatmate can be tricky."

"I wasn't involved with her!" I protested.

"You weren't?" That deadpan expression.

"No! I just slept with her. Well, she slept with me. I mean, she was the one who came to me." It sounded garbled. It felt garbled. How did I get into that mess in the first place?

"So she initiated the relationship?"

"It wasn't a relationship," I grumbled.

"So she was the one who wanted to have sex?"

"Yeah. She showed up in my bed one night."

"Did you want to have sex with her?"

I felt uncomfortable. I shrugged. Sleeping with Emily had been pleasant. It had been comforting. I liked having someone in bed with me. It took some of the loneliness away. "It was easy." That came out wrong.

"You didn't have to make an effort," Stan suggested.

"I mean it was just nice to have the company." How could I tell Stan that prior to Ivo I was the most sexless person on earth? That sex simply didn't interest me, that I had as much passion as a stone?

He nodded. "Companionship is important."

"She wasn't my companion!" I protested again. But she was. I'd felt like an old married man with her. Like we'd been married for twenty or more years. She was like an old shoe that is comfortable to wear, the one you keep around so that you don't have to buy new ones.

He said nothing.

"Do you and Ivo talk about your past relationships?" Mercifully he changed the subject but then I realized I didn't like the new one any more than I had the former.

"No." It was a fact. We never did. Well, I had told Ivo about James. But could I tell Stan about James? I wanted to talk about Danny. "I found out about Da- Ivo's boyfriend." I remembered my dream again. What had it meant?

He waited patiently.

"He kept his things. His letters and stuff."

"You read the letters?" It was a rhetorical question. He knew I had.

I nodded.

"Did it upset you?"

I shifted uncomfortably. I couldn't think what to say.

"Are you jealous?"

I nodded miserably.

"Do you think Ivo still loves him?"

I closed my eyes. Who could not love Danny? Martin adored Danny.

"And yet Ivo is with you."

I shook my head. Ivo didn't want me. Ivo didn't love me. He wanted to fuck me. Because I was convenient. Like Emily. Because I came to him.

"You don't think Ivo chooses to be with you?" He sounded surprised. I had never heard Stan surprised before.

"I'm easy. I'm free. He doesn't have to work for it." And then I shut up because I was neither easy nor free. Ivo had supported me, taken me on an expensive cruise he could barely afford (I was shocked when I found out what it cost him), paid my medical bills. Paid for Stan. Put up with my infidelity though it hurt him terribly. I swallowed. I felt trapped.

Stan just watched me.

"I don't mean 'free' like that. I mean I am convenient."

He raised his eyebrows again.

"I mean -" I burst out laughing. He did too. 'Convenient' wasn't the right word. "I mean Ivo doesn't have to work for it."

He cocked his head to the side and mulled that one over.

"I came to him. I did everything. I threw myself at him. He just had to open his door."

"So you feel that the relationship is one-sided or that you compromise more than he does?"

That sounded right. "Yeah."

"How would you describe your relationship with him?"

I couldn't think of anything to say. "I don't know," I answered honestly.

"You said that you feel he hasn't worked for it," he offered to help me along. "In what ways have you worked for it?"

"I let him fuck me," I snapped. I was surprised by the surge of anger _hatred_ in me.

"Do you enjoy sex?" He wasn't asking about Ivo specifically. I realized that.

"God, no!" I spat. I mean, it was alright with Emily. I didn't even want to think of James. I wasn't sure why I had slept with Suzanne. I guess to make Ivo jealous. I craved sex with Ivo. But that was the confusing part of the relationship.

"So you feel that sex on your part constitutes compromise?"

Why did he have to say it like that? Why did he make me feel things I didn't want to feel? "I mean that I have to do things that I don't want to do."

"Rape or coercion?" He was very matter-of-fact.

Certainly Ivo's and my lovemaking bordered on rape. I loved it! It was exciting and made me feel alive. "Neither. I mean, it's degrading."

"You feel that sex is degrading?"

"Yes." I was confused again.

"Does it have to be degrading?"

"Doesn't it? It's just someone using you." I was angry again.

Stan cocked his head to one side. "I've never thought of it like that. Do you make any distinction between sex and love making?"

I scoffed. "No," I said coldly.

"I do," he replied at once. "I love my wife very much. And when I make love to her it's a way for me to feel closer to her. If she told me she felt degraded -" he shook his head. "I don't know what I would think. That is the furthest thing from my mind. I love her and I love feeling close to her, _closer_ to her."

I loved feeling closer to Ivo too. I used to miss him as soon as he withdrew. It was like a drug wearing off – I wanted him as soon as it was over. I used to cry when he got up and went back to his own room. In the hospital when I woke up and he wasn't there I cried. I hated sleeping alone when he was gone. When he was home, I was never lonely but as soon as he left the loneliness grew with each passing second until it was unendurable. I would throw myself at him when he came back. I tried not to recall making love with Ivo, the feel of him inside of me, fire pouring into the emptiness that was me. I imagined the burn of his lips as they trailed down my torso softly to envelop me. The grip of his hands - on my shoulders, my head. The feel of his hard body on mine. Suddenly I felt flushed. The stirring in my loins made me realize I was getting an erection. I shifted my gaze uneasily trying to avoid Stan's. I shifted my position to relieve the pressure in my pants. I was more than embarrassed. I was humiliated. I risked an agonized glance at Stan. He was graciously staring thoughtfully at his empty cup of tea.

"Do you want to tell me about your dream?" he asked quietly.

I'd completely forgotten about it. I shook my head.

"Do you want to try and sleep again?"

I nodded. I needed to masturbate if nothing else. I wasn't used to going a full day without sex. Ivo usually made love to me before I fell asleep.

"Do you need something to help you sleep?"

I answered right away. "Yes." I needed something to knock me out. Oblivion was always better than reality.

He stood and walked to his medical cabinet to produce the magic pill for me.

I swallowed it without water, ignoring the burn as it went down in anticipation of the bliss it would soon bring.

* * *

*The use of these terms is intentional and not redundant. The nuance is first noted in the Prophets. From Isaiah 40:28

28\. Do you not know-if you have not heard-an everlasting God is the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth; _He neither tires nor wearies_ ; there is no fathoming His understanding.


	8. The Empty Spaces

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_**Chapter Seven: The Empty Spaces**_

The sleeping pill got me through the rest of the night. Exhaustion got me through the meeting with Ivo the next morning. I would have loved to have stayed hidden under the covers but Stan woke me early to tell me Ivo would be arriving and to watch for him. He stayed in the room with us while Ivo handed me a neat pile of my belongings. It was clear he hadn't slept at all. He looked as ill as I felt. He nervously rattled off the contents – clothing, my book bag, even my toothbrush. It was just like him to pack for me as if we were going to an overnight conference. Or to Alaska. Had I been a child, he would have packed my teddy bear and blanket. I thanked him and stood awkwardly. With Stan there, there wasn't much either of us could say. I was grateful for that. I was afraid that if I looked at him, I would cave and go back home with him. The nightmares had left me badly shaken and in need of his physical presence. He shuffled uneasily - a once-proud man defeated and utterly out of his element - and glanced out the corner of his eye at Stan before continuing.

"Are you alright?" he asked in a low urgent tone, moving to close the space between us.

I nodded. I wasn't at all alright.

"We need to talk," he begged. His worn face was positively cadaverous. I remembered my dream and shivered. I couldn't look at his eyes. I knew they would burn me alive. I preferred him blind. "Will you call me later? I'll be at home."

I was surprised. It was unlike Ivo to miss a lecture. He must have been worse off than he ever had been. I nodded to pacify him. I wouldn't call. I suspected he knew that as well.

Still wary of Stan's presence, he whispered that he loved me very much and that he missed me and that he would wait for me to call. Then he leaned in to plant a gentle kiss on my cheek, his strong hand pressing briefly into my side. I almost collapsed in his arms. I felt like Jesus being betrayed by Judas. I was certain Stan could tell how very much I loved the man I had professed to loathe just ten hours earlier.

The two of them exchanged a few pleasantries, the rain last night and the sun today and Heaven knew what tomorrow had in store for them. Then Stan thanked him for bringing my clothes and Ivo thanked him for letting me stay and Stan walked him to the front door. I wondered what they would say on the phone later. I should have read that file last night.

I fled upstairs and hid in the bathroom until Stan called me for breakfast. I sat in silence throughout the meal while he read the paper as was his custom. Then he showed me to the library and descended the stairs to meet with patients. We would meet again for lunch and then if I felt like talking he had an opening for me at two. I nodded, finding it terribly ironic that I was sleeping on my psychiatrist's couch and arranging for an afternoon session with him. I might have laughed if I hadn't felt so sick.

I spent that first morning exploring the house. There's always something fascinating about other people's houses. It shows you a side of them that you might otherwise never know. You see behind the carefully staged public presentation. Stan, I knew from the walls of his office, had graduated from the University of Cambridge and taught at Cardiff. He was awarded Most Outstanding Junior Faculty member as well as a variety of other more recent awards from other associations. From the walls in his library and bedroom I now learned that he liked fishing and skiing, backpacking and camping. He once went on a gondola and rode an elephant in Hyderabad. He'd been to Africa and Egypt and Latin America. He had had a traditional Jewish wedding - in Jerusalem. He seemed a happy, well-rounded, highly successful man.

Stan's wife worked in publishing and travelled a great deal and whether by chance or contrivance I never did see her once in the entire time I stayed there. But I saw signs of her presence in the house the way I had seen signs of Isabel in Ivo's flat: the odd bottle of nail varnish or perfumed soap, a type of Greek yogurt Stan assured me was lethal, a ladies' scarf thrown carelessly on the sofa in the library. I knew her name was Jill, which I thought fitting, and that she read PD James and Ruth Rendell mysteries, manifest in the large pile by her bedside. I knew from the photos on the wall that she was approximately the same age as her husband. She looked soft and maternal and I loved her implicitly much the way I had fallen in love with Isabel the first time I saw her. Like her husband Jill seemed very happy though the walls did not boast of her accomplishments. I thought to myself that that was the way it was with women, they weren't expected to perform on a par with men. Stan was a psychiatrist and his wife "worked in publishing". Ivo was a professor of Paleontology and Isabel worked - .

I paused. I had no idea what Isabel did. A variety of unimportant jobs, I rather thought.

I stopped to reflect on the walls in my house. The photos on our walls were of people we didn't know. They were supposedly of family, school and friends but I had never met any of them and neither had my parents. I realized how few photos had ever been taken of me and not one hung on the walls; my parents had said they weren't the photograph-taking types but they never bothered to take the rest down and it didn't stop them from speculating on whether this person was a great-grandparent or that one was Uncle so-and-so who had gone to war in India. It suddenly occurred to me that I had no photographic record of my own for future generations to speculate on and then I realized that there would be nothing to talk about even if I had, that I actually hadn't done anything. I had no hobbies, nothing I enjoyed doing outside of school. I didn't ski or snorkel or sail or mountain climb like Ivo. I went to pubs with friends, read, and had sex. I might have been proud of my degree from university if I weren't living with a PhD. By comparison, my education appeared pretty shoddy. And hadn't Ivo once told me that I was "inscientious"? He had despaired over my total ignorance and wondered what I had been doing when "the rudiments of these disciplines" (his phrase) were taught me in school.

What had I been doing? Probably blowing James in the janitor's closet. That was the sum total of my education.

I would have completely nose-dived with that admission if I hadn't suddenly remembered something. I did love music and actually knew a thing or two about it. I had spent the bulk of my spare time in college at the local record stores. Even as a child I would steal away to the music festivals in Aldeburgh to watch the spectacle on stage. At first, I believed in the fantastical world of the opera the way I believed in the fairy tales read to me at bedtime. I was terrified and excited and thrilled and ecstatic watching the story unfold. The music swept me away to a world where other people's agonies and triumphs became mine, where I didn't have to think about my own. Even when I couldn't understand the words, I intuitively understood the stories. Someone once said that your soul understands music even when your mind does not. I like to think that is the way it is with me.

I had taken Ivo to see Rosenkavalier that first New Year's we spent together. I'd been eager to share that part of my little world with him, the way lovers shyly want to share everything with one another. He hadn't known the opera and I had felt proud knowing of something he didn't. Even then my inferiority complex vis-à-vis his intellect was present. We walked from the Kestrel along the beach to the theatre holding hands. It was night and no one could see us but it was deliciously thrilling all the same, to be able to be together outside. We even danced a little and he told me I was the most graceful dancer he'd ever held in his arms and kissed me passionately so that I was hot and shaky and my knees felt weak. I ran my fingers through his short fine hair and secretly hoped he would make love to me then and there.

But on to the opera we went and how we had laughed at Ochs falling for the boy disguised as a chambermaid. Ivo whispered all sorts of naughty things to me and I had difficulty stifling my laughter which infuriated the couple in front of us. On the walk home, I came up with my own translation for the lyrics to Ochs' aria and Ivo declared it the best song he had ever heard, saying it was always to be our theme – "With me – am I wrong? No night is too long!" - and that we would always remember this night. We sang it in the car while we explored the coast together and when we drunkenly made our way back to the hotel to fall into his room for a wild night of lovemaking. When we returned to Warwick, I made him a tape of it. Reflecting on those halcyon days, I wondered what he had done with the tape, if he'd even kept it. I wondered if he ever hummed it and thought about how happy we were together then. How very happy we were. I remembered lying in his arms in the warm bed while the ocean spray beat the seawall ferociously and splashed high enough to spatter the window. As a child I had been terrified of the storms and cried when my parents made me sleep in my own room. But that New Year's I lay against Ivo, his body a hard raft for me, and found the raging weather only intensified my romantic feelings for him. I realized that was when I had fallen hopelessly in love with him.

I tried to remember when I had fallen out of love with him but couldn't pinpoint it. I don't think it happened all at once. Love is like that – you fall in love at once, running senselessly _feverishly_ in your desperation to have the other person. You ache the entire time you are away from them. Every time the phone rings you pray it is them on the other end. But falling out of love is gradual. You start to cool towards the other person. The little things they do that once endeared them to you become insufferable. You delay having to see them for various reasons. You are grateful when they have to cancel a date.

I hadn't loved Ivo for a long time before we left for Alaska, of that I was certain. I couldn't remember why I had gone with him at all, I just remembered that I hadn't wanted to go. I remembered the summer quite clearly and then Isabel and my accident, which was how I had wound up here. With Stan. I remembered hating the entire trip up until Isabel and hating Isabel afterwards. I tried to remember hating Ivo but my memory failed me. Looking at Stan's photos and remembering that first New Year's Eve, I just kept thinking of how wildly, passionately, hungrily I had loved him. I remembered last Spring in Paris, how much I'd loved him again, how I had fallen in love with him all over again. I was deeply depressed. Sitting in the domesticated space of Stan's lovely home, I missed him more than I could bear.

For some reason I didn't remember Danny's part in all of it. That Danny was a threat to my happiness with Ivo never crossed my mind. I was lonesome for Ivo and nothing else mattered. Funny that domestic life makes you yearn for another person with whom to share it. I didn't need to imagine a domestic Ivo, I knew that person better than myself. He was manifest in every part of my existence right down to the neat pile of articles he had carefully organized to ease my transition in leaving him. In the beginning, he used to leave notes for me on the fridge when I overslept – informing me that my fridge was empty but that his was fully stocked and to help myself. By the time our love affair was in full-swing, he was scheduling my dental appointments and later still my sessions with Stan. Isabel told me recently that he had done the same for her – holding her by the hand and walking her to her class the first day of every school year. She laughed and said how much she loved him for it, that their parents were the "laissez-faire sort" and that Ivo had stepped up to the task early on and been a mother to her. She'd been devastated when he moved back to England. She'd followed him to Canada.

I thought to myself that it was my fault I didn't have a collection of photos for my walls of all the things Ivo and I had done together, the places we had been. I hadn't wanted to go anywhere with him though he invited me, urged me, often enough. _Except that first summer_. The summer I had had to stay home alone. Anger flared up in me, catching me once again off guard.

I realized I could have been interesting by association – that people would have talked about me for generations to come. I could have filled the empty spaces on my own wall with the opportunities Ivo offered me. I had been to Alaska! Who else from Aldeburgh could boast that? How many Englishmen even? I could have seen the midnight sun. I had seen glaciers calving and 250-million-year-old fossils. I had met some of the most famous academics in the profession.

And then I thought of Danny. I wondered if he had had to spend his first summer apart from Ivo. The evidence suggested otherwise. I remembered the photos of him at the same conference Ivo and I had attended a decade later in Glasgow, the one where I had felt so horribly out of place, humiliatingly beneath those towering intellects. I pictured Danny's youthful amused _relaxed_ face sitting at the dinner table with scholars twice his age. He didn't appear to care that he wasn't their equal, if he even noticed. I was willing to bet he mocked them when he and Ivo were alone in the hotel room. He probably showed up the next day dressed like one of them - tie and hat and pipe. He probably made them all laugh. He probably wanted to make a film about dinosaurs and they would have been thrilled to have someone so young and trendy so interested in their arcane field of study.

I wished I could be Danny! How many blissful memories he had carefully documented in the collection hidden in the back of my closet. I wished I could have gone all of those places with Ivo – a younger, happier, undamaged Ivo – and been able to say, "Oh do you remember that time the tourists were almost eaten by the grizzly in Juneau?" "Do you remember when so-and-so fell over the side of the boat and nearly froze to death?" "To think we were swimming in shark-infested waters!" I could have made myself his partner with those experiences, his equal. I could have had something to write about.

Envy and regret washed over me in waves. Hatred for a boy I never knew, depression at the loss of a life I could _should_ have had, nausea from lack of sleep and sustenance ravaged my body until once again I was physically sick. I spent another half-hour over the toilet until I realized I was missed. Stan was coming up the stairs for lunch. I carefully washed and dried my face and stepped out in the hall to greet him, my carefully staged public persona intact.


	9. Sticks and Bones

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**_Chapter 8: Sticks and Bones_**

It hadn't rained that day. It was cold and wet in the house but the moisture came from elsewhere; it was old, as old as the house itself perhaps, perhaps older still. That sort of eternal dampness that creeps into an abandoned space and takes root, spreading with time. The sort that seeps under your skin until it penetrates your very bones, chilling you. The sort that makes you feel unwelcome, unwanted, uneasy. I shivered as I stepped involuntarily into the room. The smell of decay, of unnatural elements becoming natural once more, was strong but stronger still was the smell of death. Human death; the rats in the walls were very active.

He stood waiting for me at the end of the hallway, his eyes locked with mine so that I was unable to look away. I should have stumbled blind in the blackness but I knew the place well, knew it instinctively but vividly in the way I knew the placement of everything in my own room, and I navigated easily in darkness as in light. I could see him clearly from afar as if we were standing together, his white narrow face a sharp contrast to the black surrounding us. I'd have run if I was able but he was determined and commanding and held the strings that pulled me along. Like a puppet I obediently continued my approach, dread building with every silent footfall. His eyes were expressionless but I could see he was impatient. He had summoned me. I had to answer. Still, I walked slowly to cross over to his side.

The walk seemed endless, the way a walk to one's execution must seem. It was completely silent though the doors to all the other rooms and windows I passed were wide open and I could feel the other inhabitants moving greedily in anticipation with the cold air. They smelled me. I imagined the sound their nails might make on the warped boards and winced though I heard nothing. I imagined their mouths curved into mocking grins, their leering faces waiting for me to fail. But I did not fear them for he was stronger than they. Though they could harm me, I walked past them without glancing into the rooms. To him alone I answered. He was stronger than all of us. He was Lord and Master here and though they longed for me, they would not touch me so long as he had need of me. Thus he was both my salvation and my executioner.

I knew the hall dead ended into the French doors that opened out onto the garden. In daylight it was a pretty view, variation on green and adorned with the flowers of various plants and fruit trees. Hummingbirds and bees sought the berry and apple blossoms in springtime, adding a vibrant hum to the pleasant steady fall of the water in the fountain. In late summer the sky was crystal clear and star-studded and the wide span of lawn, thick and manicured, offered a soft place to lie back for viewing. In the fall the barbeque pit was put to good use, fuelled entirely by the branches that had fallen close by the previous winter, carefully stored in the shed where a random selection of tools was housed – requirements for the maintenance of the half-acre. And in the winter a snowman would occupy center court, his roughly-hewn proportions made elegant with the finest scarf, hat and pipe money could buy. It was a happy space in happier times.

Looking out at the garden now, I saw that it was overgrown, as if no one had lived there for some time and Nature had started to reclaim it as her own. In reverting to its wildness it had lost the symmetry of the flowerbeds, destroyed the even delineation between species, and overtaken the walkways once carefully weeded and laid with beach pebbles. The previously-cultivated garden was filled with vicious thorny weeds and the trees were barren, their dead limbs scarred and broken so that they hung like wounded corpses on posts. In the furthest corner a small statue of an angel, chipped and weathered with time, hunched over an unmarked grave, grieving the loss of a much beloved soul. I wanted to go to the angel, to brush the leaves from the stone and see what was there, but Danny stopped me, turning my attention instead to the stone wall surrounding the yard, his cold hand a dead weight on my bruised shoulder.

It was into this garden that Danny led me but what he wanted me to see lay beyond. I followed him onto the red stone terrace and watched while he proceeded through the thicket to the wall. It too was in a decrepid state, its stones crumbling, the thick cords of vines lashed across it the only thing holding it together. I felt they might strangle me, bind me to the wall if I came too close, and looked desperately at him to take pity on me, to let me flee back to the safety of the house, back to the comforting smells of death and decay but he shook his head. He only wanted me to climb it, to see what was on the other side. He didn't understand my terror.

"I can't," I stammered. "I'm not strong enough. It's too high." The wall seemed to grow taller, rising up like a fortress before me. I would never make it to the top. I'd fall and die.

He seemed frustrated and held out his hand to draw me near and I stepped forward willingly to appease him, stretching out a tremulous hand so that my fingertips lay not one millimeter from its unyielding surface. And then it came to me. I understood I had only to press lightly and it would crumble to the ground, exposing the more menacing darkness beyond. The ease with which I could learn the truth terrified me. I shuddered and recoiled.

"I can't," I whispered again, not daring to face him. I sensed his movement behind me, felt the twin streams of frigid air as his breath brushed across my neck. I shivered, closing my eyes and praying for it to be done swiftly. I knew Danny would kill me. He'd kill me and I deserved it. For my cowardice, my weakness. For all that I'd done. I leaned forward, baring my neck for the death blow. A small rapping sound abruptly caught my attention.

With a start, I woke up, squinting in the bright sun that filtered through the shutters of Stan's office windows.

* * *

My second day at Stan's called for even more rest. I was exhausted from my nightmares. He took one look at me at breakfast, commented that I looked terrible, and asked if I needed anything. I knew I had only to ask for another pill, only to sit down on the couch and tell him what troubled me but I couldn't bring myself to. I distrusted everyone, him most of all. How could I tell him that Danny came to me now at night, coaxing me to dangerous places, trying to kill me? He'd think I was mad. He'd want another round of tests.

He'd tell Ivo.

I was going mad, I was quite certain of that. And if I stayed in Stan's house one minute longer he would witness it and I'd be back in the hospital.

"I've decided to go home," I announced instead of answering him.

He visibly paused before recovering his smooth demeanor. It used to always please me when I could get a spontaneous reaction out of him but I no longer cared about playing games. "You've spoken with Ivo?"

"No. I meant, I have decided to return to my home. To Aldeburgh. My mother is in a home and the house needs looking after. Technically it is mine. I can look for a job - " I wouldn't find a job but I knew it didn't matter. I knew I would be fine. Ivo would give me the money. I felt a little twinge of disgust with myself. There was something degrading about taking money from another man, even if I didn't intend to sell myself for it. But I had never been what Ivo called a "revenue-generating source" and honestly didn't know how one went about becoming one.

"Tim," he hesitated. "I'm not sure that is the best idea."

"Why not?" It was a rhetorical question. I actually thought it was a bad idea myself but I couldn't think of anywhere else I might stay. I couldn't stay with Stan. And I wasn't about to go back to Ivo and Danny.

He placed his fork on his plate and carefully wiped his mouth before beginning. "You have a network of friends and professionals here- " what he meant was I had Ivo and him here, there wasn't anyone else. Well, except Martin but Danny had just terminated that relationship. "You are in the middle of your studies and have yet to qualify yourself for a job."

"I wasn't planning on teaching," I interrupted, wanting to be difficult in the wake of last night's trauma. "I thought I might try office work."

He looked pained as only a psychiatrist with an obstinate patient can look. "You are at the beginning of your treatment. To stop now would do more harm than good- "

"It's been more than a year," I pointed out.

"Yes, but now we are starting to make progress, to get at the core issues that are holding you back in - "

I tuned him out. The core issue was Danny and I needed to get as far away from him as possible. He would make me stark raving mad and ruin whatever chances I had in anything.

"I'm going," I said with a finality that left me no choice.

* * *

Ivo insisted on driving me. I'd have given anything to have left without seeing him but he made the argument that I had too much to transport from the train to the house and could not manage on my own. Since I was relying on him entirely to fund my new lifestyle, I acquiesced. His convertible was packed so high he feared it might tip over but he was cheerful as he drove, recalling the things we had done along the coast that first winter we had been together. He pointed out the bookshops and cafes where we'd stopped on our day trips, recalling every detail so that I was transported back in time, back to those happy days of our whirlwind romance. He reminded me of the gull he'd drawn for me and the poem I had written for him. He recited it from memory and I was inwardly pleased that he remembered it. He spoke of his upcoming trip to Antarctica – the trip he had arranged for the two of us – and the wonders there to see. We'd planned to stop first in Argentina, then the Falkland Islands, then on to the cruise ship he had booked for us. He wasn't to work, there would be other lecturers for that. The trip was to be purely touristic, we'd have explored the area together. I actually was in the mood to travel. I was restless and inquisitive and ready to run and if his aim was to make me want to return to him, he was successful. Alas, I had taken the precaution of informing my Aunt Clarissa I was moving home and she had descended like a small hurricane on the house. It wasn't that she wanted my homecoming to be pleasant; she was worried about my dear mother who was steadily deteriorating in the home and so longed for my company. How fortunate that it was only forty-five minutes by bus from Aldeburgh. I could easily go after work – unlike Ivo and Stan, she assumed I would find work – and I could have dinner with her and read to her. She would so enjoy that. I might even find something closer still so that I had more time with her. I already dreaded my new-found freedom. If Ivo had asked me, I'd have turned right around and got back in the car with him.

He didn't. He unloaded my bags and shook hands with Aunt Clarissa and commented about the weather and living so close to the ocean. Then he smiled lovingly at me and said I could call on him for anything, anything at all, he was always there to help. I thought if Aunt Clarissa hadn't been standing there he might have kissed me. He seemed soft to me, tender, like a lover. He moved toward me before placing a hand on my shoulder and with a gentle squeeze and the lightest touch of his hand on my face, he took his leave.

"What a strange man. Is he one of your university friends?" Aunt Clarissa stood disapprovingly in the doorway watching Ivo walk away.

I felt sick. I was truly on my own.

* * *

I went to see my mother twice and then never returned until I buried her the following year. The nursing staff was unfriendly and the visit itself awful. Her mind was gone, from stress or want, and there was simply no point in subjecting myself to further pain. She had no idea I was even there let alone who I was. I made it a point to introduce myself to one of the doctors on my last trip there, to let them know where I could be found if something went wrong. He nodded understandingly and I fled the stifling compound. My aunt had departed three days after I arrived and for that I was enormously thankful. I had forgotten how very much I loathed my family.

A few times I looked in the local paper to see if I might find gainful employment but there was nothing that interested me. Anyway, Ivo deposited money in my account every Monday and after two weeks, I gave up the ruse. I had bigger problems in my life with which to contend.

Danny came to me every night, showing me places I had never seen, things I had never done though they all struck a familiar chord. First he took me to an odd country home. It sprawled single-story, multi-building across a large area. The central structure was one that had housed the twins, though he did not explain their significance to me. There were rooms but no doors and trees grew randomly inside of the house, a sign of abandonment even though other signs of occupancy were manifest. He permitted me to roam, exploring their individual rooms, admiring their fine things -- clothing and shoes -- until I became aware that they were not dead after all. What had happened to them was unclear but the more time I spent examing the house, the more I understood that somehow my very presence distressed them, that I was problematic for their relationship, that I was the one keeping them apart. I turned to demand an explanation but Danny was already gone and the maid had arrived. I was left standing by the trickling water of the creek that ran through the center of the house, trying to fill a kettle for tea.

However baffling that dream, the next night was worse. Danny took me to a theater complex at night but we stayed until it was day and I could see that the stairs wound intricately this way and that, indoors and out so that my institutional memory was taxed trying to determine where I was. We were in a large hall when _they_ arrived - the men with guns. Danny had known they would come all along, and I rather think I did, too. I wasn't panicked as the others were. I was very level-headed actually. Danny left before I had time to see his reaction to it all and the son of one of the killers claimed me as his own, refocusing my attention on my own survival. While his father moved amongst the group shooting randomly, he lay me down on the floor beside him, covering us with a tarp. I lay passively while he touched me, thinking that was typical of me - that I would rather lie down with the enemy than risk my own neck. It reminded me of something Ivo had once said – that I had no values, no sense of self, that I was a chameleon. Or a parrot, Martin would say.

Was it ruthless of me to want to survive? Was I evolutionally programmed to keep myself alive? Or was I heartless, selfish, anti-social?

I wanted to find Danny and tell him that I did care, that I would fight back but all too soon I was in a smaller room with those slated to be killed. Temptation grew when I realized I didn't have to stay with them; I could call on my new-found lover and he would save me. Quickly, I spoke to the man in charge, letting him know I was not one of the expendables, that I should be removed from the room when the time came. But it felt wrong. Evil. So I ran, doing my best to navigate the complicated path through the building's maze to the outlying areas. Two others ran with me, desperate to live, but I never learned their fate. I awoke long before I reached safety.

I began to leave all the lights in the house on, bringing additional lamps from the attic to brighten those corners where Danny might lie in wait for me. I slept in my parents' room; the bed was larger and I felt safer from the hands reaching out for me from the floor. I left the telly on to fill the room with sound though its buzzing frightened me when I awoke in the middle of the night to find the station had signed out sometime around midnight. I adopted the feral cat, trapping it indoors with fish and chicken as bait so that it's yowling to escape would keep me company for a night.

But nothing helped. As soon as I closed my eyes, Danny appeared. I would have given up sleeping altogether if I could have. If I were back at Stan's, I'd have robbed the medical cabinet.

My grand tour with the Ghost of Christmas Past soon found me back in Alaska. With Ivo this time. We were alone on Chechin Island, fighting once again. I begged him to leave me be: "If you know I don't want to be with you, how can you want to be with me?"

"I'll tell you why. Because I don't believe you know what you want."

I lunged at him, striking him hard so that he fell back harder. He staggered for a fraction of a second and then thudded heavily against the trunk of a spruce tree. His head split open, blood spurting in all directions.

"Ivo?" I whispered, horrified. He didn't move. "Ivo!" I called louder. I wanted to shake him, to make him wake up. But then I knew. That I had killed him. Like a thief in the night I slunk back to the raft, back to the boat, and raced back to the harbor, leaving his body to rot alone in the open on the island.

I woke up panting heavily. For a moment I actually believed him dead. Then I stood up and literally ran down the stairs. I couldn't stand it any longer. I had to talk to someone.

I picked up the phone and asked the operator for the country code to Canada.


	10. Speak

 

 

 

_**Chapter 10: Speak**_

I made my confession to Isabel, a wanton sinner at the end of his life, a wounded animal finally given a voice. The words poured from me like sand in the hourglass. How long had I kept everything bound up so tightly - the maladies in Pandora's Box? How long had I lived this lie, one way within and another without? The more I spoke the more the need to be heard welled up in me and I heard myself confiding in her - secrets I could not bear to acknowledge even to myself ripped from my tongue. I told her of my mother, of my unwillingness to put myself out to care of her. I told her of my unrepentant use of Ivo and his money, that I had returned home to Aldeburgh to be supported by him solely to escape having to see him. I confessed to lying to her and to Ivo each about the other one, so desperate was I for someone to call my own. I had gone to her because I felt he had failed me and then returned to him because it seemed to me she had done me one worse. I told her not only of stealing Danny's belongings but plagiarising his work for my own gain, to make a name for myself. I told her what a soulless monster I was, wanting people as well as things and then discarding them with no more thought than grinding out a cigarette. I told her of my feelings of inadequacy, resentment that Ivo _Danny_ was so much more than I could ever hope to be. I had sinned terribly, hating him and taking his money and ruining him and Danny had come for vengeance and was literally driving me insane. He haunted me not only in my dreams - those horrific visions of the past and future - but everywhere. I couldn't leave the house for fear of coming across him – on the bus, in the theatre, by the sea – and I could not stay in the house one second longer. He waited for me in corners, came at me from nowhere. Sometimes he climbed through the window and sometimes he hid under my bed. He wanted me and he would not stop until I gave myself to him.

I told her of the horrible things he had shown me – the evil I had done and the horrible deed I was about to do. _Ivo's death._ Because I would kill Ivo. I was afraid. I was terribly, terribly afraid. Out of my mind with fear. I was losing my mind.

It took her awhile to get control of me. I frantically paced while I spoke, restrained by the short tether of the phone cord which exacerbated the tension. I was physically and mentally shaking, as if I were in the center of an earthquake.

"Dear Tim," she said when I had calmed enough that she could get a sentence in. I could hear the love and strength in her voice. "I've been waiting for you to call. I'll come to you, shall I? I can catch a flight out tonight."

"Yes," was all I had left to say.

* * *

Ivo came with her which didn't surprise me at all. I imagined the first thing she had done was to call him. He would have raced to the airport to meet her and then on to me. I expected as much of her. I didn't know then that he had spent most of his weekends at the Kestrel, watching me walk up and down the beach - lost, alone. If I had known he was close by, I would have been comforted. I would have run to him. As it was, I was quite relieved to see him. He had a way of taking charge of things which while maddening on a day-to-day basis was hugely reassuring in a crisis. Like the child who looks to its parent, I needed him to assume control of me. During the day when Isabel stayed with me to keep the ghosts at bay, Ivo went about organizing my relocation to Warwick. He was far more thorough than I might have been - arranging for the phone and water to be cut off. The electricity had to stay on for the pump, he told Isabel and me. If it flooded, it would need to work to keep the water out or it could damage the house. I thought how very different my childhood would have been if I had had Ivo. We would have had a ground floor for one thing….

He spoke with the neighbors about keeping an eye on the property, giving the most trustworthy of them a key and then carefully locking away items that were subject to theft - "or damage", he said in the neighbors' defense. He even cleaned the refrigerator - "Worse than a chemisty lab!" he complained to Isabel, hauling the toxic substances out to the rubbish. He neatly organized my things for my return to him exactly as he had packed them for my departure.

We went in two cars, Ivo having packed far more of my possessions that I had ever taken to college. He felt I would want my books and records and even the odd piece of artwork for which I had once expressed a fondness. "Home is where the heart is," he recited and while it was trite, it carried a ring of truism coming from his lips. He drove the van with my things and Isabel drove me in his car but even the handicap of a clunker could not slow him. He dangerously passed others on the narrow road – doubtless cursing them for their lack of consideration behind the wheel – and we soon lost sight of him in the first ten miles of the trip. I remarked that he would probably be unpacked and have returned the rental by the time we arrived and she laughed pleasantly.

We chatted amicably about innocuous subjects, mostly Aldeburgh. She said what a splendid existence it was, to live by the sea, how envious she was. She and Kit had only the quiet straits of Vancouver Island. It wasn't nearly as interesting, nothing like the _real_ sea where you couldn't see anything on the other end. She missed the English countryside. She came often to see Ivo – less often once he had me, though she didn't say that – but they usually did London, Oxford, cultural things. How lovely that I lived someplace where both he and I wanted to be, where we were both happy.

"No, I hate it," I said abruptly and then regretted speaking the words aloud for it reminded me of the things I had told her and I didn't want her to remember. "I mean, I much prefer life in the city. And Ivo doesn't like it here. He says it is much too tame. He couldn't find a single fossil on the entire beach."

She laughed, ignoring my first comment. "Yes, he would say that. The man who plays with dinosaurs."

"Did he always like them? When he was little, I mean." I could well imagine he had dozens of them in his room and recreated the food chain in his childhood games – T-Rex eats Stegosaurus, etc.

"Dinosaurs?" She fumbled in her purse for a cigarette, one hand on the wheel. I helped her to retrieve the pack and lit one for her. "Thanks." She took a drag and then left it between the fore- and middle-fingers of her left hand where it burned, forgotten. "No, Ivo was more of a frog and butterfly kind of boy."

" 'Frog and butterfly'?" I repeated, laughing. It sounded like the title of a bad rock 'n' roll song.

"Yes, he had dozens of jars all over the house. One never knew what one might find. Usually it was just a guppy or a crawdad but once he brought home a bullsnake and it got loose. Dear Mother, her eyesight was terrible. She called to me from her bedroom to ask what the long dark thing on the floor moving in the hallway was. Father was furious and forbad any more creatures in the house. Poor Ivo had to release all of them. He cried very hard but I told him they were happier in the wild and that he could enjoy them every bit as much outside where they were free as inside where they were not. Thereafter he spent all of his time out of doors, on his hands and knees in the dirt. So I guess I am more than a little to blame for the turn his life took." She laughed again but it was a happy sound. "The only thing he was permitted to bring in the house were the shells of dead things – beetles and snails and such. He had a huge collection of those."

"I did that, too!" I cried, surprised to think that Ivo and I had similar tastes as little boys. "Only I collected beach shells. And pebbles and crabs and starfish." I was breathless, excited that there was someone else who shared what I had thought a peculiar obsession.

"I think all little boys do," she said easily, pulling off the frontage road onto the highway. "Little girls play fairy princess and little boys gather a host of unattractive dead things." Her lip twitched, exactly as Ivo's did when he was supressing his laughter. "Of course Ivo played fairy princess with me too."

"He was into drag back then?" I burst out laughing. I couldn't imagine!

She laughed louder still. "No! Of course not! Dear God, Ivo! No, he was the cutthroat pirate threatening to dismember me if I didn't hand over the loot."

"What was the loot?" I asked, thoroughly enjoying the image of a ruthless young Ivo. It fit him to a 't'.

"Sweets, I think. Probably money or records as we got older."

"I did that, too!" I exclaimed again, remembering how I seduced James to give me sweets and money. And then because the memory embarrassed me I fell silent.

"He was a wonderful brother," she said feelingly. "'Is' a wonderful brother. I'm lucky to have him."

I felt I should say that I was lucky to have him too but I didn't. _Couldn't._ I sat awkwardly for another minute before she began again.

"About Danny - "

I felt as if I had just received an electric jolt. I'd never heard Danny's name spoken aloud before by someone who knew him. It felt strange, eerie, to suddenly speak of him. "I'm sorry," I said, shamefaced to remember that I had stolen his things from her house.

"No, don't be. It's only natural to be curious. Especially with Ivo so clammed up." She shook her head and the ash of her cigarette looked in danger of falling on her clean slacks.

I said nothing.

"I know it's hard to think about," she continued.

I shook my head. "I don't know what's wrong with me. I don't know why I think about him all the time." I was losing my mind, that was why. But I didn't think she needed to know that.

"I think he comes to you," she was treading very carefully. I could hear it in her tone, in her carefully considered words. "He can't be at peace until Ivo accepts it."

I was lost. "Accepts what?"

"Ivo never got over it." And then sensing that she had said something to hurt me she started again. "It was such a senseless thing. Why did it have to happen? To them. You know? You read about that sort of thing in the paper but you can't imagine it could ever happen to you. You never think anything like that could touch you, tear your world apart."

Either she was speaking in tongues or I was too exhausted to follow. I waited for it to come clear.

"In many ways I am no better than Ivo. I still can't accept it. Senseless brutal - " The ash fell and disintegrated before it hit, spreading sooty specks of its former self across her black trousers.

"What happened?" I asked, utterly at sea. It dawned on me that I did not know what became of Ivo and Danny, how two so closely joined had split apart.

"That night you mean?" she said and I felt a cold darkness descend on us, as if someone had just stepped over my grave. "Ivo didn't tell you? No, of course he wouldn't. He was attacked as well. He was lucky to have made it out alive. Danny was more of a fighter so they went for him. They kicked Ivo senseless but Danny they beat relentlessly - with bricks and a pipe. They meant to kill him. They came back a little over an hour later – just to make certain they had finished him off. The coroner said so many of the blows came after he was already dead." Bitterness dripped like venom with her words and I saw that her hands clutched the wheel, the cigarette butt in the ashtray where it belonged.

I was too stunned to speak.

* * *

We stopped for lunch. We were seated by a window where we could watch the grey afternoon sky and the aftermath of the storm. Water ran down the glass, blurring the outside view.

_Danny. Murdered?_ "What happened?" I asked again when the waiter had departed.

She shook her head. "Teenage boys looking for some queers to kill." She was still angry. I could feel it radiating off her in waves. Ten years on, her hands were clenched.

Danny had died. Danny was killed. And Ivo. Ivo almost killed. "I can't- " I couldn't imagine it, couldn't accept the fact that he was dead. "How?" I was morbidly curious.

"No," she shook her head firmly. "I was a cow for telling you. I thought you knew. There can be no point in our rehashing the details of that horror. Let sleeping dogs lie, Tim. Danny's purpose here – with you - it is something different." She paused to reflect on that.

"I want to know," I insisted. I felt I had the right. After all, I was the one being haunted.

She held her ground. "Ivo wouldn't like it. He won't even like our talking about it. About Danny. He'd want to tell you himself."

"He never told me anything," I pointed out. "I found out about Danny by accident." Had it been an accident, my stumbling across him what seemed a lifetime ago?

She sighed, fingering the rim of her tea cup. "He's afraid."

"Of what?" I demanded. I still felt I was being handed pieces from different puzzles, left to struggle with their assembly though she knew they would never fit together.

"Of what this will do to you," she said unhappily. She looked as if she were about to betray her own brother.

"Do to me?" I was exasperated.

"He's worried that it will frighten you, drive you away from him." And she looked terribly guilty.

"Frighten me? Yeah, I am frightened. I am scared out of my fucking mind because everywhere I look, there is Danny." The waiter was approaching with our orders but I didn't care. "I am so afraid I am losing it!" I clutched the table so that it rocked on the uneven floor, causing her to sit back.

She shook her head sternly. "No. It's something else," she said in an undertone.

And we both smiled our polite thanks to our server.

* * *

I had difficulty sleeping that night. Ivo had given me my old room and Isabel his, claiming the couch for himself. He was leaving for Antarctica in a few weeks, he said, so he didn't mind at all. He waited until Isabel was in the shower before adding that it would give me time to work with Stan and get my head together. When he got back, we would see what was what. He looked sad but hopeful.

I had mixed feelings. On the one hand I was relieved not to have to sleep with him when I was thinking about Danny. On the other, I was a little indignant that he was leaving me when I needed him most. I fell readily into the feminine _weaker_ role, allowing him to play the masculine _stronger_ part. I felt he should cancel Antarctica, stay with me to see me through this latest crisis. I wanted him to lie down with me and hold me and tell me everything would be alright, that he would make it right. I didn't want this distance that had opened up between us. It was as if a wall had descended, placing him just out of reach. In bed, missing him terribly, I realized that in calling Isabel it had been Ivo I was reaching out for, Ivo I wanted. The door and hallway that separated us was a physical manifestation of the enormous divide in our relationship and it gnawed at me incessantly. I wanted to go to him – to get up out of bed and crawl to him, begging for forgiveness. I hated myself for being weak, for wanting him merely because he was apart from me. But I couldn't help myself. It was in my nature, deeply ingrained from childhood.

I heard them arguing about me and I grew still and listened carefully, so strange was it to hear myself spoken of in the third person by the two most important people in my life.

"He is hallucinating because he has gone off his medication without proper medical supervision. Psychotropic drugs are such that when the patient withdraws, it is not unlike withdrawing from illicit substances. Had he withdrawn gradually, the side effects would have been mitigated."

"They are not hallucinations," she remonstrated with her brother, her twin. "Ivo, he knows things! He has seen things. The garden. The angel on Danny's grave - "

"You fill his head with this nonsense - " he snapped.

"It isn't nonsense! How could he know about those things? He saw Danny when he was a child, with his father - "

"He saw Danny's films and read his letters and believes in his confused state that he sees those things - "

"He saw our house - " I could only imagine her head shaking stubbornly, trying to reason with the man of reason.

"Bollocks!" His voice was cold, as cold as an Alaskan glacial surface. "And of this we shall not speak again. I do not need you feeding his fears - "

"Danny - " she began in desperation.

"Danny is dead and nothing comes after death. Nothing!" he roared. "Now no more please, or I shall ask you to return to your home. If you cannot help me, at least do not hinder me in my efforts to save Tim." And he stormed heavily from the room.

I lay miserably in my lonely little bed, thinking about what each of them had said. Danny had been so real to me but he had not come to me in more than a week, not since Ivo and Isabel had arrived. Had I imagined it all then, the ghost that followed me night and day? I shivered and drew the covers closer to me.

Whatever the case, I did not want to come between Ivo and Isabel. I did not want to be the divide that Danny had shown me I would be.


	11. Touched

[](http://s774.photobucket.com/albums/yy22/Sivanasya/?action=view&current=Untitled-42-1.jpg)

 

 

Touched  
You say that I am too  
So much of what you say is true  
I'll never find someone quite like you  
Again

_~ Touched,_ VAST _ ****_

 

_**  
**_

_**Chapter 10: Touched**_

Ivo went to Antarctica. I was in denial right up until we put him on the plane. We'd been so happy the two weeks I had been home. The first night back he gave up on the idea of our just being companions. He came into my room after Isabel retired and made love to me. I was desperate for his touch and threw myself at him. From that point on, he was with me every night until we gave up the ruse of his occupying the couch entirely and Isabel suggested we swap rooms since she was just one and we were two.

And so we returned to our own more spacious bed for our nocturnal romps.

We settled nicely into our household routines. Ivo's was already established at the university and it was a busy time for him with essays and exams to grade before the holiday break. He also spent a great deal of time packing. Ivo believed that travel was an enormous undertaking requiring hours of meticulous preparation. And after so many years he had it down to a fine science. He not only counted pairs of underwear and socks to ensure sufficient supply, he strategically placed everything in the suitcase according to the time when it would be needed. He would be nineteen days total at sea plus two in flight and one in a hotel. He packed those items he would need first in Ushuaia, Argentina (where he would spend only one day) on the top. These were followed by clothing for the Falklands (where he would stay a full week traveling by zodiac from the cruise ship to various points commencing with West Point Island and departing from South Georgia). It wasn't the warmest part of summer and he anticipated needing layers in the Falklands as well and repacked his case to allow for the additional items. It would then be a full day between South Georgia and Brown Bluff, his first stop in Antarctica.

He weighed the bag several times to make certain he had not made a mistake and would be assessed a nasty surcharge at the counter – something that invariably made him lose his temper with the hapless worker checking him in. His carry-on item contained his most precious possessions – his notebook and his travel schedule with tickets and reservations attached – as well as three novels and an extra change of clothing should he be delayed and have to check into a hotel in some god-forsaken part of the world or should the airline lose his luggage in transit ("Perish the thought!").

Neither of us mentioned the unhappy fact that he should have been packing for two as we had originally planned. He was excited about the trip and I was miserable. I was all the more put-out as we were lovers once again and it seemed to me he should want to stay with me rather than go off to the frozen wilderness to search for fossils. I couldn't understand why he didn't appear to feel the same insatiable need to be with me every minute of the day. I didn't share those feelings with him but I gave Stan an earful, letting him know that not only was it a selfish thing to do, it made me feel less important in his life, almost as if he didn't really love me.

"How did you feel about being apart from him when you moved back to Aldeburgh?"

"That was different. I _was_ leaving him," I huffed.

"And now you feel he is leaving you?"

"Well, he is coming back." I didn't want to consider the possibility that he might not come back. Antarctica sounded like a treacherous place. What had he said about not being able to survive more than a few minutes in the water if you fell in?

"Do you feel abandoned?" He'd asked me a day earlier if I felt "abandoned" by my parents.

"Oh for fuck's sake!" I wasn't in the mood to revisit yesterday's topic.

...

Isabel had friends in London and spent a weekend there so that Ivo and I could have some alone time. She had come specifically to stay with me while I was alone and with Ivo there she felt like a third wheel. She hadn't known Ivo and I would work things out so quickly. I made the argument that I would be just fine and she could return home but Ivo wouldn't hear of it. I found it entertaining that the woman he accused of "filling my head with fantasies" was to be in charge of me. I wondered what he thought I might do in his absence. But, then, my track record was hardly stellar. He had sent Isabel to watch me once before - in Juneau that ill-fated summer.

Kit was to fly over for Christmas and Ivo would return the second week of January. That would give us one week to go to Paris "or someplace fun" before term started.

The reality of his imminent departure set in. I grew depressed but hid it well enough.

I had gone back on my medication which stabilized me. I didn't see Danny at all and most nights were taken up with Ivo's exhausting style of love making so that I slept quite soundly. I began to believe him – that it was all just hallucinations for being foolish and not filling my prescriptions as Stan had recommended.

No Danny, just Ivo. And Isabel. It was a very happy time, those weeks before he left me, and I was comfortable in my own skin again. He and Isabel, however, fought like cats and dogs and I wondered that they had even survived childhood in the same household. If it wasn't her habit of leaving her towels and clothing on chairs, it was her choice of food or reading material. Virtually everything she did irked him but his caustic comments bounced off her like water off a duck. She took no more notice of his constant barrage of criticism than she did of the weather. Most confusing of all was the fact that they both seemed quite content with their method of interaction.

"Please do not paint your toenails on the sofa! It will ruin the upholstery."

" ' k." And she continued as if nothing had been said.

"The entire house reeks of perfume. Must you?" Said as he sneezed violently into a tissue. Ivo's nasal passages could not tolerate strong chemical smells.

"Sorry."

"How can you read that trash? Honestly you are worse than Mother!"

She never even looked up from the book, holding her apple between her teeth while she turned the page.

"Doesn't it bother you?" I asked her, bewildered.

"Hmmm? No," she said and I could tell she meant it. "Ivo is like a parent. If he isn't harping on you, he feels he isn't expressing his love for you. Each time he tells me that I am doing something completely appalling, I know he means it for the best. It's how our parents treated us and he assumes that is how he should treat me.

"Ivo's a bit of a virgin when it comes to relationships," she added apologetically.

It was a leading statement and I couldn't resist. "What was he like, with Danny?"

"Well," she put her book down and her eyes had that distant look she always had when she spoke of that time, when Danny was still living. "He was younger, much younger. Not so much in terms of age. But he was so different then. Not necessarily happier, but more optimistic, you know? He had a passion for life. He still has a passion for life but he was more – I don't know – 'open'? to people then. He liked people more." And she laughed. "I'd known he was gay forever but our parents didn't find out until he was in college. They had a terrific row and Mother refused to speak to him. She wasn't the gentlest person. Ivo is actually very much like her. He was very bitter for the longest time about it. Father still supported him through school but he refused to come home. He said there was no point when all she would do was berate him and he wasn't about to change. That was typical of him – he came on his own terms or not at all. And Mother was the same. She had drawn the line in the sand and neither of them would budge. So he stayed away. I went to see him instead. And then he landed the job at Acadia the same year our parents moved to Australia. It's too bad. I think they might have been able to repair their relationship if they hadn't been so far apart.

"He was very pleased with himself, landing a respectable position like that. Paleontology was such an odd choice. No one thought he would find a job. Except me. I knew he would make it work for him. Anyway, he loved the university. It was the perfect lifestyle for him. He could teach during the school year and head out during the summer for his research. He went mostly to Wyoming and New Mexico in those days, not Alaska. Sometimes he traveled further south, but mostly he stayed in the States. His work was his life then. He was totally academic. It was hard to believe this was the same boy who used to haul me off to gay nightclubs every weekend. But Ivo has a terribly practical side to him. It was good money and then he discovered that he blossomed in that environment. They appreciated his talent in a way we couldn't. The students and his colleagues – they all admired him. Mother had spent all of her time deflating his ego, convinced he had to be beaten down or he would be ungovernable." She laughed again. "She had decided early on that little boys were inherently naughty and little girls good. So I was the favorite and Ivo was always in trouble." Then her face clouded. "It's hard to be brought up under that assumption. And Father was so passive. He never crossed her.

"Anyway, Kit and I were in Vancouver then so Ivo came to us for all the holidays. He was always in good spirits, always eager to tell us what he was up to. He loved his work."

"He still loves it," I interjected, thinking how he glowed when he came home from a particularly lively session with his students.

"Of course he does. Ivo doesn't belong in the real world. The most he can do is to putter about on cruises with other academics. That's about as lively as it gets for him."

I was trying to reconcile a sedate Ivo with the man I knew. "How did he meet Danny?" I was in the mood to torture myself with the whole story and I had a willing and knowledgeable narrator.

"Danny was his student. Yes, one of those relationships," she laughed. "Ivo was terrified he'd get caught and lose his job – any job for the rest of his life – but he couldn't give him up. It was the first time he'd had a relationship that lasted more than a weekend." She looked guiltily at me. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't be telling you any of this."

"No, no!" I hastened to assure her. "It doesn't bother me. I've wondered for so long and Ivo never spoke of him. I didn't even know he was dead."

She sighed. "Danny was different. He was very determined. He wanted to make his mark, you know? I guess that was what attracted Ivo. He was so driven. But that's about all they had in common." Her face grew dark again. "Danny came from a rough background. He was like a wild animal. Ivo liked that. He wanted to tame him; teach him to trust; comfort and protect him, undo some of the damage. Be nicer." She laughed harshly. "And I suppose he was successful to some extent."

"Did you like Danny?" I'd only ever seen the photographs of them together.

"Not at first. He wasn't an easy person to be around. He was very blunt. Always said what he felt. I mean we all do that to some extent. But Danny had a meanness about him. All the good in him was buried so deep. Ivo was tenacious and stuck it out but Danny was a hard nut to crack. So many layers of protection. A shell within a shell within a shell. Like the little Russian dolls one buys – what are those called? I wasn't sure I ever really knew him. Each time I saw him it was like starting all over again. He'd be somebody different.

"He was angry, troubled. He was always looking for a fight. But he loved Ivo. Ivo was good to him and he loved him for it. And that was enough for me. He loved Ivo so I accepted him and in time I learned to love him as well."

Her words hurt me terribly, but I had only myself to blame.

"We were patient with him. We knew he'd been abused by his father, sexually abused so we didn't have any expectations of him. He had so much to overcome." And she peered at me oddly. "He showed you that part of his life, didn't he?"

I swallowed before nodding. He had shown me. And I had known it was him. I just hadn't wanted to accept it. I couldn't believe we were having this conversation at all.

"You said Ivo never got over him… " I remembered and felt crushed again.

"It was wrong of me to say that. I mean that his death was so senseless. It came out of the blue. It stunned us. One minute they were planning on Alaska for the summer and the next minute he was dead. Ivo never forgave the ones who did it. He began to mistrust people. He saw himself at odds with the rest of society. He became hostile, bitter. Belligerent. It took him a long time before he could trust anyone again."

I hated to think that I was the person Ivo had chosen to trust. My allegiance was so tenuous. She must have sensed my diffidence because when she spoke again, her tone had changed entirely.

"Tim," she said, closing her eyes and speaking passionately. "I know you don't believe it but he changed so much when he met you. I wasn't the only one to notice it. Martin, Fergus, even Kit. We all saw how animated he was. How happy he was. He loves you so much. And I just ask that you let him." She opened her sad eyes to look imploringly at me. "Let him love you."

I wanted to say I didn't know how to love anyone like Ivo loved me. I wasn't sure I'd ever loved anyone. I didn't even know what love was. I might have said it if Ivo hadn't come home just then.

I spent the next day wailing to Stan that I had failed everyone – my parents, Clarissa, Ivo, Isabel. People had expectations of me and I didn't know why I let them down, why I failed every time.

"Are you afraid of trying to succeed?"

I blew my nose into the tissue he handed me. "What do you mean?"

"What do you think would happen if you tried?"

My head hurt too much to answer and we agreed to call it a day.

...

Ivo couldn't kiss me good-bye at the airport and it made me angry. We had had to make our good-byes in the car. He held me and told me how much he would miss me and that he would write every day without fail. I knew he would. Ivo was one of the great letter writers of his day. I was convinced he spent hours composing each one but nothing was ever crossed out and I can't see him having the patience for revisions. He probably did it in one fell swoop.

In the car with Isabel on our way home I pondered aloud how long it would be until someone like Ivo could kiss someone like me in public.

"Not in our lifetime," she said grimly and I could tell that Danny's death had jaded her on society as well.

Ivo had not been gone a full day but I found myself first dejected and then latching on to Isabel. I don't know why I did it, why I couldn't stand being alone for a second. Perhaps it was because she was there. Perhaps it was because she could never be mine. Perhaps to get back at Ivo for the perceived slight – his leaving me behind. I don't know. I just suddenly found myself wanting her – physically as well as emotionally.

It started when I went to lie down beside her. I felt so terribly lonely in Ivo's bed and asked if she would stay with me. Sweet Izzy. She has such a loving spirit. She pulled me into her arms and kissed my hair and sang a lullaby to me and I never wanted to leave. I felt wanted and warm and imagined I was sexually aroused as well though I didn't have an erection. I figured it was the meds.

The next morning she was exactly the same but I had changed radically. It was no longer enough for me to simply be there with her as a friend. I wanted more of her. All of her. I wanted to drown in her like alcohol, bathe in her like water. I wanted her to desperately want me, need me. Our circumstances made her even more desirable. I began to feel like Romeo and was ready to scale the wall to be with her, to kill myself rather than compromise.

My session with Stan was extremely uncomfortable. All I could think about was Isabel and I sensed he knew I wasn't really there at all. He asked about Ivo and I felt terribly guilty realizing I was no longer missing him. I said something to the effect that it was only the second day and he would call when he was settled. He hated calling when he was traveling – flying made him grouchy and he didn't like to be on the phone with me when he was like that. He said he was like a fine wine, that all the movement unsettled him and he needed to breathe for a bit before he was himself. He'd have a nice dinner, unpack and then he would be cheerful and call.

Thinking about that made me remember that Isabel had once told me she hated telephones. She and Ivo only spoke on the phone when they absolutely had to, usually just to convey important information. They were letter writers and had kept their correspondence from nearly a quarter of a century. I'd seen hers, neatly bundled in packets in Ivo's desk drawer. I'd never read them. I wondered how she wrote, what type of words she might use. I imagined she was as good a writer as Ivo.

We went out for dinner that night – my suggestion. I didn't want to be home when Ivo called. We stayed late chatting about literature and plays we might go and see that weekend. She said we ought to go to London and I readily agreed. I told her I didn't want to stay cooped up in the flat and she looked sympathetic. Back home, she kissed my cheek like a loving sister and retired to her own room. I was disappointed that I couldn't stay with her but happy for the time we had together.

It was when I was undressing in Ivo's room that I saw it lying out in the open. I hadn't noticed until that very moment - that long thin slanting scrawl so unlike any other. I'd know Danny's peculiar hand anywhere. It struck me as odd that a letter from Danny should be left out. I knew Ivo was very careful to avoid the subject. The likelihood that he had neglected to pack away Danny's things seemed slight at best. More curious still were the contents of the note. I had never read it before and I was fairly certain I had seen almost all surviving traces of him. Well, except his correspondence with Martin. Anyway, it wasn't a letter at all. It wasn't addressed to anybody. It was a short cryptic writing, almost like a book review of sorts, but not even a real review. Just four sentences on a piece of yellow legal pad paper. An arcane philosophical statement that rattled me:

_Dostoevsky's Underground Man was conscious of his problems and understood that his acts were not just. Yet he did nothing to change his life, preferring inaction and avoidance rather than resolution._

_Many reject the notion that things happen for a purpose because man does many things without having any purpose and this is what dictates the course of human history. Do you think your actions stem from a need for revenge, some irrational desire to inflict suffering on others?_

I reread it several times, uncertain what to make of it. Perhaps most disturbing was the uncanny feeling that Danny was addressing me directly.


	12. The Four Temperaments

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: In writing this chapter I began to think that I had made Tim too extreme - a caricature instead of a character. So I went back and reread sections of the book to see what had made me originally perceive him this way.
> 
> p. 205 "I could actually say his name without fainting or bursting into tears or having a stroke."
> 
> p. 78 "He had confessed this weakness in himself, his need of me, his inability to bear separation from me, and I wanted him strong and cool and scornful. He loved me, therefore I loved him no longer."
> 
> p. 85 "The devil in me that makes me conduct myself this way became active again. Ivo didn't want me, or appeared not to want me, so once more I wanted him."
> 
> p. 70 "I who had never before been sulky, coquettish, a creature of moods and explosions of temper, was all these now. But perhaps, yes, I had been so once before, with James Gilman."
> 
> In rereading the book, I was again struck by how frequently Tim touches on some truth only to move on without doing anything with it. We learn that his mother was 47 when she gave birth to him and figured out by the time he was eight that it was a mistake; that he was having sex as a child with the older boys at Leythe and considers this merely part and parcel of life; that Martin tells him he was selected for the program purely by chance and not based on talent (Martin was enjoying a holiday in Cornwall and Tim's name is Cornish). There's no discussion of pain or hurt in all of this; he relates the information to us as a matter of fact. He had essentially shut down emotionally so that his life was tepid.
> 
> And then he meets Ivo. Who unleashes that torrent of repressed emotions and sends him into a tailspin. Ivo brings Tim to life in a way he never was before. It terrifies Tim to want someone so much: "Already I was longing for him daily, nightly, and no less so immediately after one of our consummations, those near-rape struggles on his bed or mine."
> 
> This is why I fell in love with these characters – the passion they had for one another. And this is why I have problems with the author's rendition. So much could have been done with the issues of Tim's tumultuous love for Ivo; his fear of being homosexual; his hitherto easy acceptance of his inferiority to others in almost everything. Tim is a walking contradiction, a joy to any writer. He is someone you can spent hours dissecting and never understand him any better for the effort.
> 
> Here, dear reader, is where I think the author dropped the ball. This is incredibly rich material with which to work and yet Rendell/Vine resorts to the trite happy ending of boy-gets-girl. Instead of any sort of self-searching that might help Tim come to grips with who and what he really is, Ivo is neatly killed off and Isabel shows up to save the day (we're led to believe they have a chance at happiness – based on knowing one another for ten days…). I originally threw the book against the wall when I found that out but now part of me thinks this may have been the author's intention – setting Tim up for more misery once he gets Isabel (think Christiane Rochefort's Les petits enfants du siècle). I gather Rendell has a very low opinion of her characters.
> 
> I am not satisfied with that ending. I want Tim to take a good hard look at himself, not just regret killing Ivo as he does in the book; I want him to dig down into the layers of confusion and contradiction - his psychological make-up - and figure out how he became the mess he is. And then I want him to change as a result.
> 
> So I took the boys back to Juneau and then went forward, rewriting No Night is too Long to give it a more appropriate ending.
> 
> I hope that this explains why Tim is all over the place in this story. But then, you shall have to read the original work and decide for yourself if my version is credible.
> 
> ~ Pace is the trick

[ ](http://s774.photobucket.com/albums/yy22/Sivanasya/?action=view&current=Acryinthewind_zps374ba0cc.jpg)

_"Your veins are full of ice water and mine are boiling."_

~ Emily Bronte, _Wuthering Heights_

**_Chapter 11: The Four Temperaments  
_ **

The tenor of the house changed. Isabel seemed stiff, uncomfortable even, in my company, as if she was disturbed by something. I thought she must be remembering my deplorable condition when she came to fetch me in Aldeburgh and made an effort to appear calm and happy. Actually I was very happy and didn't have to make any effort to show it. Calm was another matter but I was with her, madly in love with her, and nothing else in the world mattered. So far removed at that time was Ivo from my thoughts I had almost forgotten him. That's how the mind works though - out of sight, out of mind. At least my mind. I wonder who thought of the saying "absence makes the heart grow fonder"? Certainly no one like me.

In my mind I was mulling over what chance I stood with her, imagining the two of us together. That's how irrational I was. And the more distant she was with me, the more I wanted her. Her closed door at night was an affront to me, the arrival of her friend from London an unwelcome obstacle to my desire. I spent nights caressing the scarf she had lent me on one of our walks, forgetting entirely that on that very day I had told myself I had discovered a love that transcended sexual desire.

I wanted her. I had to have her.

By that time Ivo's letters had begun to arrive daily. Isabel was always very pleased when one came, calling me from wherever I was to open it at once. She wanted to know all about Antarctica, what he was doing, what he thought. Very soon he became the sole topic of our conversations and I bitterly resented his intrusion – a reminder of a homosexual past I wanted firmly behind me. But to please her I read aloud the more innocuous passages.

Ivo's letters were filled with a passion for life and living, a profound admiration for a natural world unmarred by man. He spoke not of things buried and past but of the austere beauty of the land and its non-human inhabitants. He penned a landscape of muted red and orange skies, thick reedy grasses and ice sheets; of steep cliffs covered in moss and lichens and the strong winds that made climbing them treacherous; of the regions only flower, the tiny Antarctic pearlwort, and its only songbird, the South Georgian Pipit; of the Banana Belt and the occasional rain there as welcome as a sunny day; of the ice pack and the only active volcano in that southern-most region.

The crisp blue air was painful to breathe and his lungs ached from the intensity. He tired on his hikes and had to stop and rest periodically, so high was the altitude. But climb he did, awed by the spectacle of sheer size. There – and his hand shook with excitement so that some letters were crowded and others elongated - the ice bergs were measured in miles not meters and spread out the size of small countries. There the ice cap buried mountain ranges as high as the Alps. He wrote of the wind and chemical weathering – ice and sand over thousands of years – that had sculpted the red rocks of the Dry Valley so that they resembled everything from elephants to space ships and the landscape looked more like Mars than Planet Earth.

Of his fellow travelers he waxed lyrical, recording the foolish things they had said and done as well as the funny and the clever, but there was no angry derision in his words. Back in his natural element his softness had returned and he was tolerant in a way he could not be in the workaday world. He was making new friends – a New York doctor and his wife, the oldest members on the voyage; a novelist from Wisconsin who was very peculiar and therefore worth getting to know; a fellow academic who spent his breaks bird-watching in various locales. Their enthusiasm for the most inhospitable place on earth earned his esteem and together the group of them ventured out onto terra incognita, sharing the wonder.

That he hadn't written to his sister, as he always did, never occurred to either of us. It was as if he anticipated that she would read the ones to me. But I couldn't let her read them. In addition to lengthy descriptions of polar flora and fauna they also contained lengthy declarations of his love for me. I didn't want to be reminded of the fact that I had been with another man. I saw myself now as a woman's man and was busy playing that role. Ivo was just an embarrassment to me, a childish habit of my past that I had retained far too long.

I did read those parts, of course. I had to if I was to respond correctly. I couldn't let him think anything was amiss or he might come back early, God forbid. So with disgust I skimmed in minutes what doubtless took him hours to write. He missed me terribly, he said, and couldn't wait to be with me again but even as I read the words they seemed to me an addendum to the rest of the text, as if he was suddenly remembering he was supposed to miss me, that he had been so very busy being happy without me he had forgotten me until the very end of the letter. He said all of the correct things a lover should say: that it wasn't nearly as enjoyable as it would have been had I been there to share it with him; that he missed our literary discussions in bed late at night when neither of us could sleep; that no New Year's Eve would ever compare to our honeymoon at the Kestrel, with the rain thickly splattering the window while the sea roared in the background. But something seemed off. His real passion lay in his love for the land, not for me. It turned my thoughts curiously to him once again.

One day he wrote a profound lamentation of his failure as my friend and lover and for the first time actually broached the topic that had dominated our lives for the past year and a half: "I have no business to expect more than you can give. You have given me and still give me so much. I am only now beginning to see how bigoted and censorious I have been and I know I must love you without reproaches." He blamed himself entirely for stifling me, for discouraging openness between us. He loved me for who I was, not someone I felt he needed me to be. It was the first time he had acknowledged Danny to me.

I tried very hard not to acknowledge Danny but that angry spirit made it impossible. He was back and terrorizing me on an unprecedented scale. The nightmares were replaced with concrete _tangible_ evidence of his existence – notes in that uneven hand. It was a literary game of cat and mouse wherein I was made to find myself again and again in the fictional characters referenced. He was rarely outright, preferring to make me work for the information. Sometimes he would leave me only a name ( _"Notre Dame des Fleurs"_ ) or a quote ( _"We are left alone, without excuse."_ ~ Sartre). Other times entire passages - _"She was wearing a pair of my pajamas with the sleeves rolled up. When she laughed I wanted her again. A minute later she asked me if I loved her. I told her it didn't mean anything but that I didn't think so. She looked sad."_ \- Camus but an obvious reference to my relationship with Emily.

I would often have to look it up, sometimes going out to the university library. I read the criticisms and reviews as well as the original, hoping to find a less damning interpretation to the obvious. At first, I pretended not to understand what it meant, that somehow the excerpt could not pertain to me. I was such an artful liar I was able to deceive even myself for a while but day after day he hauled me back into the literary world that had once been my sanctuary - once, so very long ago when I dwelled in a blissfully insensate state.

He made me out to be the most indifferent of beings: _"I must be taken as I have been made. The success is not mine, the failure is not mine but the two together make me."_

The most self-indulgent: _"It was enough to try the temper of a saint, such senseless, wicked rages! There she lay dashing her head against the arm of the sofa, and grinding her teeth, so that you might fancy she would crash them to splinters!"_

The most vindictive: _"All the world used her ill, said this young misanthropist, and we may be pretty certain that persons whom all the world treats ill, deserve entirely the treatment they get. The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion; and so let all young persons take their choice"_

I was sitting on pins and needles waiting for the next missive to fall from the sky. Always it came on the same dull lined yellow paper. ("Legal pad," Isabel had informed me that fateful night in Juneau as she wrote her letter and I admired her elegant neck.) Never was it in the same place or at the same time. Once it came in the mail, hidden between Ivo's letter and a bill for Martin. Once I woke to find it on my pillow and then tucked into my book. One morning I went into the kitchen to find it waiting on the counter for all to see. I snatched it away hurriedly like a thief and shoved it into the bottom drawer with all the others, panting in fear. Ill timing could result in my exposure and I grew hot with shame imaging Isabel's response.

Of course I could have told her. I had done it once before - confessed to using Ivo for my own selfish gain. But that had been in the heat of the moment, when I was unstable. That had been before my feelings for her had changed. I could not endure her censure now. I was cowardly. I would rather face a firing squad.

Never had I so desperately needed Ivo and never was I more unwilling to call for him. The last thing I wanted was to involve him in the sordid mess, conjuring happy memories of Danny while I was painted black. Isabel, alarmed by my behavior, suggested we contact him and I flew at her in a rage, shouting that if she did, I would leave for good this time. She must have learned something of the passion of men in her interaction with Ivo for she dropped the topic altogether, spending her days instead trying to find amusements for me to keep my mind off my troubles.

As if there was any escape! I was consumed with fear, incapable of rest or relaxation. I never knew when a message might arrive and wandered the house ceaselessly in search of the next one. I even prayed for the nightmares to return – how much better it was to be hunted in my dreams than in broad daylight. I imagined that Danny relished the power he had over me, could picture the sardonic amusement on his face. How it must have entertained him to keep me falling all over myself. I was the perfect subject for his film noir. I imagined he was exacting revenge and I begged him to tell me what he wanted, that I would do anything if only he would stop. But my prayers and supplications seemed only to goad him on, make him all the more threatening. I would round the corner to the bathroom and there another would be – silent lines on dull yellow paper damning me. I took up smoking, cancelled my appointments with Stan, stopped eating and sleeping. Desperation had me in its grip and I was no longer able to function.

So grim was our existence that when Isabel proposed we drive up to Scotland to join Kit in his hunting expedition the week before Christmas, I leaped at the opportunity. She and I shared a distaste for the slaughter of innocent animals and had not intended to see him before Christmas Eve when he came to us but it was with great alacrity that we left the next morning in Ivo's car, laden with clothing and food and books that we might need isolated in the wilderness in a cabin with no electricity or running water.

"It's an adventure!" I cried enthusiastically when she reminded me of the lack of amenities. It would have been Ivo's attitude, not mine. Ivo referred to menacing storms as 'a little rain'. I was like Danny, I liked nice hotels and champagne brought up to the room. The Goncharof had been as much of "lacking in amenities" as I could manage. I had been very vocal in my complaints that summer in Juneau but compared to the hell on earth I was living, the wilds of Scotland were a veritable nirvana.

And so we set out in the rain. I felt happy and carefree and laughed loudly at even the smallest joke. She must have thought I was losing it. But I didn't care. I was leaving Danny trapped in the house and the thought cheered me enormously. In the car speeding away from my demon, I began to comfort myself with the belief that it was all in my head, as Ivo had said. My mind played tricks on me and fear and guilt give rise to outlandish fantasies. Probably I would go home and nothing would be there in the bottom drawer of my dresser. I had fabricated the whole thing once again. I was stressed and irrational and Danny was dead. My soul soared. It sang. Literally - I sang bits of my favorite opera librettos and Isabel, catching my high spirits, joined me in the songs she knew.

By the time we arrived in the Lowlands, we were excellent company and Kit must have been most surprised to see two previously dour souls laughing and having the time of our lives. He welcomed me affably, mumbling something about being glad the worst was behind me and took it upon himself to unload the car and get us situated. It occurred to me only later that I somehow must have believed the masculine presence of Kit would protect me, that Danny only preyed on weaklings like me. I was suddenly very calm and confident as I so often was with Ivo or James, indeed so confident that I took a post-prandial walk - thinking that Kit would want to be alone with his wife after nearly a month's separation.

I actually wanted the time alone to clear my head. I felt I had been in a pressure cooker ever since Ivo left. I laughed out loud thinking that that was what Ivo did when he was out of sorts – went out into the wilderness – and that he always said I was at a loose end when left in nature for more than five minutes. How very wrong he is, I thought gleefully to myself moments before I was thrown to the ground, the hunter's bullet whizzing past me.

Shock to the body is never pleasant and it took me more than a minute to catch my breath and do a mental check of which parts of me were damaged. There was a small amount of blood in on my face but I was only bruised, not broken. Only then did I look up at my rescuer.

"Hello, Tim."

It was the first time I had ever heard Danny speak outside of his films. In my dreams he had always been silent. It wasn't at all how I imagined his voice would sound. It was flatter and younger, gruffer and softer. There was a slight creak to it but not a hint of breathiness. His voice was as unusual as his characteristic handwriting. I stared up at him, once again in shock.

"You look terrible," he said sympathetically, surveying me with a slight tilt of his dark head, his hands resting calmly in his pockets. "Like you've seen a ghost."


End file.
